'Murderer's House' - University of Victoria

political context of the fictional scenes. Also, in the other direction, the fictional scenes
contextualize the documentary footage and radio broadcasts because they show the effect
the bombings and radio broadcasts had on civilians (mostly women children and older
men). So, the documentary footage and radio broadcasts and the fictional scenes are like
two sides of the same coin. Do you think this is an accurate description?
H.S.-B.: It has this side to it. But concerning the documentary footage and the film
footage, I have to add one aspect. This is that I found that the scenes that I had tried to
write and create, you know, they just showed how the war affected the women, what it
made out of the women, and they were not enough. As I have lived through the war
myself, I felt that they were somehow artificial and not in a good sense. Artificiality can
be wonderful, but in that sense it was not convincing. That‟s why I changed an entire
part of the film. I replaced the scenes I had first written in my screenplay with different
scenes of the mother telling the fairy tale in a field of rubble that still existed in Berlin at
that time. And I intercut that with the documentary footage, as you can see. And, with
that, I felt that somehow a strange thing happened. It looked almost surrealistic, although
it was documentary, it was the real thing that I showed, and not something that I had
created out of some art design stuff, but it was true. It was true like the fairy tale, just in
another sense. That was very important for me and also for the actress, and we both
decided to do it this way and not to use the other footage that had already been shot, you
know, about the women trying to get water, milking cows and that kind of stuff.
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