Director's Portrait:

Such an amount of self-confidence is not the worst qualification for a budding filmmaker. Roland Suso Richter, born in Marburg and ending up for a while in New York as a visiting student at the Actor's Studio and on a course in Directing, was twenty-two when he cheekily came along with his first feature film. Kolp, a story set in the first few months after the Second World War and produced by Richter with his screenwriter and lead actor Frank Röth, immediately became a festival hit.

The fact that nobody liked his second film two years later and that it took another three years before television beckoned with a series is the typical fate of a gifted filmmaker in Germany: high praise - followed by nothing at all. However, Richter, who can lay claim to good nerves and an incredible stamina, didn't let himself be put off; he made almost a dozen episodes for two series and completed a TV movie each year from the beginning of the nineties, from Frohes Fest, Lucie through Dagobert and Svens Geheimnis to Die Bubi Scholz Story, although he didn't have to wait as long for the corresponding and well deserved prizes as he had done for that first directing job. The awards started coming right away.

It was only twelve years after Kolp, though, that Richter returned with A Fortnight To Life to the place where he had first begun his career. Going back from television to cinema, that is like breathing deeply, a big difference, he said in 1996: "They never want too much creativity in television. It is more important there that you are finished at six o' clock".

The cinema was the only conceivable place for such a thematically controversial film and one that is decisive for the director's artistic development as After The Truth where Josef Mengele is put on trial: no profile of the despicable, cruel doctor, but rather the bold fiction of a still living Mengele, which seeks to exemplify the aftershocks of the holocaust through to the present day via one of its most terrible figures. The film offers a legally breathtaking construction as far as the defence of the accused is concerned, but it never excuses his atrocities.

The German critics reacted harshly in some cases, they didn't want to even start entering into a debate about this bold premise. All the more important for Richter then were the presentations of the film at international festivals in Toronto, San Sebastian or Chicago. Being able to be present as an artist abroad and to profit from the exchange between Europe and America serves as a kind of corrective for him. It was a lesson for him in a positive way how the Canadians were better able to cope with the fiction about Mengele and how people in Spain reacted more spontaneously and swifter to the demands which were purposely made of the audience in this film. Richter would thus like to have a go at shooting in English to make use of understatement and this behaviour's restrained nuances which are so very much different from anything in Germany.

What would look breathless to many of his colleagues would be a great step forward for him compared to the current pressure of work: he would feel most comfortable of all if he could get into the rhythm of a film a year. At the same time, Roland Suso Richter is one of the few directors in Germany who is totally at home in either cinema or television. He is shooting a two-parter Der Tunnel for the private channel SAT. 1, which will also include a feature film version. And Eine Hand voll Gras, based on the screenplay by Uwe Timm, will again be one of those urgent and pressing films for the big screen like the Mengele picture. This time around, it is about an eight-year-old Kurdish boy who has ended up in Germany. But he would never have thought it possible that they'd have him trained as a drug courier.