21st February, 2013
Source: The Independent
The Australian director Cate Shortland has made a quite stunning film about the collapse of Nazi Germany, seen not from a Berlin bunker but through the eyes of a 14-year-old girl whose SS father and mother, complicit in war atrocities, have disappeared to face the music.
Lore (Saskia Rosendahl), now in loco parentis, must conduct her four younger siblings from the family home in Bavaria to their grandmother’s farm, 500 miles to the north outside Hamburg. Travelling on foot through a countryside littered with corpses and scavenged by starving natives like themselves, the children survive by trading their parents’ jewellery for food, ever mindful of the occupying forces – Russian and American – closing in…
The Guardian review:
Lore isn't your standard WWII movie
16th February, 2013
Source: The Guardian
Given its transnational provenance – its Anglo-German source novel adapted by a British-Bengali screenwriter, its Australian director and its bleak Nazi-era subject matter – I’m reluctant to dub Lore a straightforwardly German movie. This might seem counterintuitive given its story: a 14-year-old German daughter of prominent Nazis is left to trek northwards across a ruined Germany in the weeks after the Nazi collapse, her infant siblings and a displaced Jewish boy in tow, and her Nazi assumptions slowly unravelling…
Cate Shortland talks Lore,
the Oscars and More
8th February, 2013
Source: Collider
Cate Shortland established herself as a serious filmmaker with her impressive feature debut, Somersault, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2004. Her second film, the visually stunning Lore, which opens February 8th, follows the harrowing journey of a fourteen-year-old German girl (Saskia Rosendahl) who leads her four siblings across a war-torn Germany after her Nazi parents are imprisoned by the victorious Allies at the end of World War II. When she meets a mysterious young refugee, Thomas (Kai Malina), she must put her trust in the very person she was always taught to hate in order to survive.
Shortland talked to me about the challenges of making a film that delves into gray areas and raises questions about every concept we have of family, love and friendship. She discussed the book that inspired the film, her collaboration with screenwriter Robin Mukherjee, portraying the characters with objectivity while also giving them a sense of humanity, researching the historical era, and creating the look and visual language of the film. She also revealed how the film affected her personally, her reaction to Lore being selected as Australia’s official Oscar entry for Best Foreign Language Film, and her upcoming project — a love story set in Bali…
No Lore Lost:
A Holocaust film unlike any other
7th February, 2013
Source: New York Observer
From countless movies, books and television documentaries on the History Channel, we know about the Nazis who were rounded up and tried as war criminals after World War II, but what about the children of the Third Reich who survived? What happened to them in the eyes of the allies, the Germans and the world? This issue is illuminated in Lore, a brave, gripping, relentlessly absorbing film from Australia, shot in Germany and played entirely in German with English subtitles. It’s Australia’s deserving contender for this year’s Academy Award, for a very good reason…
Lore Indiewire Review:
Evocative & Enigmatic Look
At Post-WWII Fallout
6th February, 2013
Source: Indiewire
With her beautiful and expressive debut feature film “Somersault,” writer/director Cate Shortland established herself as a filmmaker with a sharp sense of the emotional complexities of young women. And now, eight years later, she returns with belated follow-up effort “Lore,” another tale of a young woman not only navigating her burgeoning sexuality, but the emotional and moral fallout of post-World War II Germany, all while she battles to keep her family together and alive as power in the country changes hands…
DigiCult
