Manchester horror looms over ‘Fade’

‘Film changed me’

CANNES, France, May 27, (AFP): Hollywood actress Diane Kruger said Friday she took her new film role as a mother who loses her family in a terror attack to show how survivors are often left alone with their suffering.

Kruger, who drew glowing reviews for her part in “In the Fade” by German-Turkish director Fatih Akin, said the cast and crew in Cannes for the film’s premiere were haunted by the 22 victims of the Manchester bombing and the fate of their families.

“I haven’t slept in days thinking about what happened, not just in Manchester but (in other attacks) all around the world,” Kruger told reporters.

“We live at a time when such horrors are occurring almost daily. You read about 22, 23, 100 dead but you never see a film about the people who are left behind. How do you continue to live after experiencing something horrible like that, how can you come to grips with such injustice?”

The star of “Troy” and “Inglourious Basterds” appears in her first movie role in her native German as Katja, a woman living in Hamburg who is married to a former Kurdish drug dealer who has put his life back on track (Numan Acar of “Homeland”).

When a bomb rips through her husband’s office, killing him and their young son, the police initially suspect a gangland killing or a dispute within the German port city’s large Turkish community.

It soon emerges, however, that neo-Nazis were behind the atrocity and Katja, covered in tattoos and black leather, launches a crusade for justice.

“It was terrible to live with, really upsetting... the film almost killed me,” Kruger said.

“I haven’t worked since... I haven’t read a script since. The film really changed me, it changed my life.”

Akin wrote the screenplay based on one of Germany’s biggest postwar scandals: the discovery in 2011 of a group calling itself the National Socialist Underground (NSU) which carried out a series of racist murders over the course of a decade.