Touching and thought - provoking cinema series

German film ‘ The Ninth Day’ (Der Neunte Tag) will be screened as the third film of the series ‘Darkness Before light’ at 7 am on Friday January 31 at Goethe Hall, Colombo 7.

Directed by Volker Schlöndorff, ‘The Ninth Day’ is set in February 1942. The Luxembourgian priest Henri Kremer was granted nine days’ leave from the concentration camp where he was imprisoned. The Gestapo officer Gebhardt confronted him with a life-or-death decision: Kremer was asked to betray his own convictions by persuading his national church to collaborate with the National Socialists. If he failed to do so, not only he, but also his family and his imprisoned co-brethren would be facing imminent death.

For nine days, on each of which he had brilliant rhetorical and intellectual duels with the Gestapo officer, Kremer grappled with this insoluble moral conflict that defied notions of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’. The resultant film, built around extracts from the priest Jean Bernard’s diary, is a vivid and stirring specimen of polished dialogue and excellent acting that examines the eternal issue of individual responsibility.

All the films in the series ‘Darkness before light’, focus on religion-related interpersonal conflicts and discrimination in various ways, moments and places. The settings reach from a village in New England during the 17th Century to the current Berlin Kreuzberg district. All plots of the thrilling films describe detailed individual experiences and situations which makes this film series very touching and thought-provoking.