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Russian auteur Kirill Serebrennikov, whose latest feature, “The Disappearance of Josef Mengele,” debuts May 20 in the Cannes Premiere section of the Cannes Film Festival, has justice on his mind.
His latest film, adapted from the best-selling French novel by Olivier Guez, follows the notorious Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, who found refuge in South America at the end of WWII and was never captured. He died in Brazil in 1979 without having been judged for his crimes.
It is a subject that strikes home for the director, who left his native Russia shortly after the country’s invasion of Ukraine. Asked if he thinks Russian President Vladimir Putin might similarly elude justice once the war finally ends, Serebrennikov insists: “I can’t be a prophet.”
“I know that history is like this: Sometimes, people are dying in wars and the people who started the war have no responsibility,” the director tells Variety. “They just become the heroes of their nations.”
Produced by Charles Gillibert at CG Cinema (“Annette”) and Ilya Stewart at Hype Studios (“Tchaikovsky’s Wife”), “The Disappearance of Josef Mengele” stars August Diehl (“A Hidden Life”) as the infamous Nazi doctor, who conducted inhumane medical experiments on prisoners at the Auschwitz concentration camp and was branded the “angel of death.”
The audacious film is told from Mengele’s point of view and follows his years as a fugitive, as he finds sympathy and support among the South American political elite while also reciting a litany of self-serving justifications for his heinous crimes.
The director worked closely with the French novelist Guez to discuss the “philosophical and practical approaches” to adapting the prize-winning novel, which was published in more than 30 countries. Serebrennikov composed the script, acknowledging it was “a difficult task to embody this type of person we would call today a monster.”
“Disappearance” nevertheless paints a damning portrait of Mengele in his final years, as he grows increasingly paranoid, rambling and delusional — an interpretation, the director admits, that is partly an effort to deliver a dose of poetic justice to a war criminal who was never tried for his crimes.
“All his ghosts and all his nightmares are part of my imagination,” says Serebrennikov. “I would love to believe that sometime, late at night, [criminals like Mengele] have a spark of guilt, and all those ghosts come to them. As it’s written in Shakespeare’s plays, ‘Macbeth’ or ‘Richard III.’ As it’s written in ‘Boris Godunov’ — [Russian playwright Alexander] Pushkin’s and [composer Modest] Mussorgsky’s masterpieces.
“Now we understand that it doesn’t work [that way]. It’s the complete opposite,” says the director. “All these people who are responsible for killing millions, they don’t feel any guilt. They feel nothing.”
Serebrennikov left Russia in 2020, following the suspension of a three-year travel ban imposed by the Kremlin on trumped-up charges. That ban notably prevented the director from presenting two previous films — 2018 rock opus “Leto” and 2020 fever dream “Petrov’s Flu” — at the Cannes Film Festival, where he has been a mainstay since his 2016 debut “The Student” premiered in Un Certain Regard.
Five years later, Serebrennikov says a return to his homeland would be “impossible.” The world, meanwhile, has grown darker, the future clouded with uncertainty. “Look at America. Everything has changed in less than 100 days,” he says.
The director sees this dawning age as a return to demagogues and cruelty, to a political order that the Soviet-born filmmaker, like many others, hoped had died out with the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. The end of history, as it turns out, did not bring with it a prolonged era of Pax Americana. The threat this time seems to be coming from everywhere all at once.
“The world we used to live in is collapsing, is dying,” Serebrennikov says. “It’s…under attack by quite a lot of forces. From people who start wars and don’t care about killing other people. From people trying to attack democracy. From people who are trying to attack different aspects of democracy. Now we understand that we are very vulnerable.
“I always try to find something good, even in the worst situation,” he continues. “We’re coming back to the [realization] that we need to fight for our values. We’re kicked out of the comfort zone. Now is the time to fight for what we believe in.”
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