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out her longings and erotic desires knowing at the same time that she
is in safety. But this game turns serious when the prisoner breaks out
of prison and seeks refuge in the woman’s flat. An ambivalent
relationship marked by fear, hatred and the longing for mutual respect
and love develops between these two totally different people. As
time goes by, Irene increasingly loses control over her feelings. When
the police track the fugitive down to her flat, she is prepared to give
up the life she has led until then and run away with him. And it seems
that a new life will begin for them both …
“The love story develops very slowly with a typical ’Iain Dilthey-female
character’,” Haag explains. “This slow and precise narrative
form will be somewhat more dramatic than in his previous films, but
Gefangene is basically all about the tension between the two main
characters.”
As Haag observes, an important stage began before the actual shooting
when Dilthey spent time with the three actors on the fine-tuning
of the screenplay and rehearsing their parts. Andreas Schmidt is
known to cinema audiences especially from the films of Eoin Moore
like Conemara, Pigs Will Fly or Im Schwitzkasten since he is a regular
collaborator with the Irish-born filmmaker and most recently he
appeared in Andreas Dresen’s Sommer vorm Balkon. Jule Boewe
came to greater prominence in Florian Schwarz’s Katze im Sack which
was shown in the Perspektive Deutsches Kino section at this year’s
Berlinale. And Eva Loebau (who appears as a friend of Irene’s) was
in Dilthey’s Ich werde Dich auf Haenden tragen and was the female
lead in Maren Ade’s prize-winning Der Wald vor lauter Baeumen.
Ich bin die Andere
Scene from “Ich bin die Andere”
(photo courtesy of Clasart Filmproduktion)
Type of Project Feature Film Cinema Genre Drama, Literature,
Love Story, Psycho-Thriller Production Company Clasart
Filmproduktion/Munich With backing from FilmFernsehFonds
Bayern, Filmfoerderungsanstalt (FFA), HessenInvest Producer
Markus Zimmer Director Margarethe von Trotta Screenplay
Peter Maerthesheimer, Pea Froehlich Director of Photography
Axel Block Editor Corinna Dietz Music by Chris Heyne
Production Design Uwe Max Szielasko Principal Cast Katja
Riemann, August Diehl, Armin Mueller-Stahl, Barbara Auer, Karin Dor
Casting Sabine Schroth Special Effects CA Scanline/Geiselgasteig
Format Super 35 mm, color, cs, Dolby Stereo Shooting
Language German Shooting in Munich, Frankfurt am Main,
MB
Asmannshausen, Casablanca, June-July 2005 German Distributor
Concorde Filmverleih/Munich
World Sales
StudioCanal · Muriel Sauzay
5, Boulevard de la Republique
92514 Boulogne-Billancourt/France
phone +33-1-71 75 85 00 · fax +33-1-71 75 89 73
email: msauzay@studiocanal.com
www.studiocanal.com
Five years ago, Clasart Film’s Markus Zimmer met the late
Peter Maerthesheimer – who tragically died from a heart attack at a
session of the Deutsche Filmakademie in June 2004 – at an event dedicated
to Rainer Werner Fassbinder where he heard about
Maerthesheimer’s new novel Ich bin die Andere which centers on a
young woman suffering from schizophrenia.
After reading the novel, Zimmer was enthusiastic about having the
novel adapted for the cinema, but another company had already
optioned the film rights. However, when the rights subsequently
became available again, Clasart wasted no time in acquiring them and
then applied for script funding from the German Federal Film Board
(FFA) for Maerthesheimer to work on a screenplay with his regular
partner Pea Froehlich. They had collaborated in the 1980s on the
Fassbinder films Lola and Die Sehnsucht der Veronika Voss.
With the screenplay on the way, Margarethe von Trotta was
approached to direct this “schizophrenic melodrama” after the
successful collaboration with Tele Muenchen on Rosenstrasse. “It is
quite a different kind of project from what Margarethe has done in
recent years and this was a conscious decision by both of us after
Rosenstrasse,” Zimmer explains. “We wanted to try something completely
different. We didn’t want to do a historical women’s story
such as one would have expected from her after films like Rosa
Luxemburg, Marianne and Juliane or Rosenstrasse. We decided to take
this story which is very unusual and controversial and I think it will be
quite a surprise for everybody.”
In a multi-layered story which touches on such issues as child abuse,
self-mutilation and the splitting of the consciousness, Ich bin die
Andere follows the melodramatic course of events after the young
engineer Robert Fabry (played by August Diehl) spends the night
in a hotel with the mysterious Carlotta (Katja Riemann). The next
day, he meets her again – as the lawyer Dr. Carolin Winter. A confusion
of identities and passions takes its course to the point where
Robert puts his own life on the line …
Once Riemann heard about the project, it was soon clear that she
would play the part of Carlotta/Carolin – she had played the lead in
von Trotta’s Rosenstrasse and was awarded a Coppa Volpi as Best
Actress at the 2003 Venice Film Festival – and internationally renowned
veteran actor Armin Mueller-Stahl was a “clear choice”,
especially since he had worked with Maerthesheimer and Froehlich in
Lola and Veronika Voss. In addition, the film will be the first time that
the 1950s/1960s star Karin Dor – who also worked with
Hitchcock (Topaz) and starred in the James Bond film You Only Live
Twice – appears before the camera again after some 30 years’ absence
from the cinema screens.
Diehl, though, only came to be considered for the role of the young
engineer Robert because the production had to be put back by a year
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