L’heure de la vérité (Die Stunde der Wahrheit)

To open the series **Liberation! New Beginning?**, we present a neglected masterpiece of Holocaust cinema. Former SS officer and camp commandant Hans Wernert (Karlheinz Böhm) has assumed the identity of one of his Jewish victims, reinventing himself as Jonathan Strauss, a successful civil engineer in Israel. He has married Dahlia (Corinne Marchand), a Jewish woman, and built a new life. But when an American sociologist (Brett Halsey) interviews Strauss as part of his Holocaust research, the carefully constructed façade begins to crumble.

Director Henri Calef was a fascinating outsider in French post-war cinema. Together with the renowned sociologist Edgar Morin as co-writer, he created this uncompromising and strikingly modern examination of the Holocaust and its aftermath—both a daring drama and a philosophical study. **L'heure de la vérité** was ahead of its time and quickly disappeared from cinemas in both France and Israel. A rediscovery. (Christoph Huber)

Introduction by Christoph Huber

Photo: Austrian Film Museum

**Free admission**