Friday Film
Vor der Morgenröte

Fri, 16.08.2019
6:30 PM Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan Kolkata

(Before Dawn – Stefan : Farewell To Europe)

Director: Maria Schrader, colour, 106 min., 2015/16

Austrian writer Stefan Zweig has fled from the Nazis and Europe. In Rio, he attends a banquet held in his honour, and in Buenos Aires he takes part in the PEN Congress. In January 1941, he arrives in New York, meets his first wife again, and complains about the many people in Europe now requesting help who prevent him from writing. In autumn, he lives with his second wife, Lotte, in the Brazilian city of Petrópolis while working on his novella, "The Royal Game". A few months later, he and Lotte commit suicide. With "Before Dawn", Maria Schrader succeeds in creating a haunting and subtly contemporary film about the subject of "exile" that also reflects a piece of European cultural history.