Vor der Morgenröte

Stefan Zweig was a star author in his day and, together with Thomas Mann, the most translated German-language writer. Zweig left his native Austria in 1934 to go into exile, from which he never returned. In her film, which is as stringent as it is sensually opulent, Maria Schrader shows the world-famous author in six episodes of his life - from his first stay in Brazil and his participation in the PEN Congress in Buenos Aires in 1936 to his visit to New York and his first wife Friderike in 1941 and his death in Petrópolis in 1942.
This episodic structure lends the film a remarkable depth that makes it possible to deal intensively with the great tragedy in Stefan Zweig's life: "Zweig was someone who refused to look at things in a woodcut way. This highly sensitive master of shades of grey suddenly finds himself in a time in which there is only black and white, in which differentiation becomes increasingly impossible." (Screenwriter Jan Schomburg)