South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
Dunham, Fry connect with heritage
Stephen Fry and Lena Dunham play a convincing father and daughter in German director Julia von Heinz’s first English-language movie, “Treasure.” Set in post-communist Poland, the comedy-drama had its world premiere recently at the Berlin International Film Festival.
Dunham joked in an interview that when she sent her mother a photo with Fry, her mother said: “I think we now know who your real father is.”
Dunham said she was full of nerves meeting Fry. “Meeting your heroes is a complicated thing, and it turned out to be better than I could have dreamed.”
The film shows the pair on a road trip to Poland to retrace family history. Fry plays Holocaust survivor Edek, who reluctantly accompanies his daughter Ruth, a New York journalist. He confronts painful memories and shares parts of his past that he had kept buried for years.
The story is based on Lily Brett’s book “Too Many Men.”
Fry learned Polish for the role. Both actors said they connected with their Jewish heritage.
“When I read the script, I could hear my grandfather’s voice, and it became more so the further we got in,” Fry said. “It never occurred to me growing up that there could be an opportunity to reinvestigate the story in that kind of way.”
“I heard echoes of my great-grandmother Mildred, and not just the stories that we told in our family but the stories that we didn’t tell.” Dunham said.
Dunham’s family came from Poland, close to where the film was shot. Her great-grandmother lost nine siblings in the Holocaust in 1941, something she only learned through her investigations into family history.
Her character suffers the unsaid aftermath of her parents’ experiences. It was this trauma that von Heinz wanted to explore.
“If one person in a family experiences war or terror or trauma and will not talk about it, maybe to protect their children, maybe to protect themselves, they will feel it,” the director said. “It will travel through the generations until someone is ready to feel it and to confront the parents and to have a dialogue.”
Fry said it is understandable that a survivor with a daughter growing up in New York would not want the child to know “the absolute depths of depravity that he would have seen every day as a survivor in Auschwitz. She’s in America. She’s free. This is the land of wonder and splendor and happiness and indeed, happy Jews.”
Filming inside Auschwitz is prohibited, so von Heinz got permission to re-create the barracks on a football field just outside the fence. She felt the scenes there were integral to Fry’s portrayal of Edek.
“This place does something to you that you cannot say, but you feel it,” von Heinz said.
March 3 birthdays: Director George Miller is 79. Actor Hattie Winston is 79. Singer Jennifer Warnes is
77. Actor Robert Gossett is
70. Actor Miranda Richardson is 66. Actor Mary Page Keller is 63. Rapper Tone Loc is 58. Actor Julie Bowen is 54. Singer Ronan Keating is 47. Actor Jessica Biel is 42. Singer Camila Cabello is 27.