Movie Review: The Counterfeiters (2007)

The Counterfeiters (2007)

3.5 out of 5 stars

Winner of the 2007 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film

Terry and I avoided watching the actual Oscars Award ceremony last Sunday evening by watching a previously recorded to DVR copy of The Counterfeiters, an Austrian-German foreign language film that won an Oscar five years previously.

Synopsis from Wikipedia:

It fictionalizes Operation Bernhard, a secret plan by the Nazis during the Second World War to destabilize the United Kingdom by flooding its economy with forged Bank of England bank notes. The film centers on a Jewish counterfeiter, Salomon ‘Sally’ Sorowitsch, who is coerced into assisting the Nazi operation at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp.

The film is based on a memoir written by Adolf Burger, a Jewish Slovak typographer who was imprisoned in 1942 for forging baptismal certificates to save Jews from deportation, and was later interned at Sachsenhausen to work on Operation Bernhard.[2] Ruzowitsky consulted closely with Burger through almost every stage of the writing and production. The film won the 2007 Best Foreign Language Film Oscar at the 80th Academy Awards.

The Counterfeiters (film), Wikipedia article

Not an easy film to watch, of course.  Nothing focusing on the Holocaust and Nazi concentration camps is ever easy to watch and never should be.  Even with the handicap of having to read subtitles, I found it easy to keep up with the story.  But, in the end, I found it difficult to relate to any of the characters, so I failed to make a meaningful emotional connection.  I admired Burger, who kept sabotaging Sorowitsch’s efforts to counterfeit the dollar.