C&L Film of the Month: The Counterfeiters
By Mark Groubert Thursday Feb 07, 2008 6:30pm
It takes a clever man to make money, it takes a genius to stay alive.
The Counterfeiters is the powerful Oscar-nominated feature selected as part of this year’s Best Foreign Language Film category from Austria. Directed and co-written (with Adolph Burger) by Stefan Ruzowitsky, the picture is the dramatized account of Operation Bernard, the Nazis secret plan to destabilize the United Kingdom by flooding its economy with forged Bank of England currency. The protagonist is a Berlin-based Jewish counterfeiter named Salomon Sorowitsch.
Sorowitsch, a petty criminal, womanizer and a lush, is determined to survive the war at all costs. Based on the memoirs of professional printer Adolph Burger, (portrayed by the rising young actor, August Diehl) who himself imprisoned by the Nazis for political dissent, the film takes us into 1936 Berlin where we meet Sorowitsch, a successful forger of currency and passports. In Berlin he is well known as The King of the Counterfeiters.
