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UPCOMING EVENTS

 NEWS 

Stephen Dillane and Kerry Fox in Storm

DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT

"A polite and inconspicuous woman in her fifties sits across from Bernd Lange and myself at her completely disordered desk and offers us some tea. She cuts off some slices of ready-made cake with a plastic knife and puts them on paper plates in front of us. She is neither prepared for visitors, nor is she a particularly good hostess. There are more important things in her life.

At the time, Hildegard Uertz was a prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague. She had abandoned her home and family to conduct the first international lawsuit in which rape was acknowledged as war crime. She and her colleagues nearly brought Slobodan Milosevic to his knees, and only Serbian demagogue Vojislav Seselj’s hunger strike really got her infuriated. During our third meeting beginning of last year, Hildegard Uertz told us that, if necessary, she’d let him starve to death. She explained how she was fed up with the way he continuously blackmailed the Court, constantly trying to fool everyone. And how she worried about her husband, who received threatening phone calls at home in Bochum by Seselj’s nationalistic party companions. But instead of finally giving up the fight and retiring to a quiet German provincial court, she is investigating as a member of the Hariri-Commission in Lebanon since last spring.

The encounter with Hildegard Uertz gave the initial start-up for this project, and after two years of script development, and some maybe inevitable detours, my focus still lays on our central character, Hannah, and the dilemma in which she suddenly finds herself once the tribunal advises an arrangement with the defense. A deal that allows accelerating the proceedings. It seems a reasonable compromise, for all parties involved. Except for Hannah.

Integrity on the one hand, and stretching the truth on the other hand - this is the conflict of values in which Hannah has to maneuver. Witnesses’ individual fates, like Mira’s, are endangered to fall in disadvantage because the tribunal must subordinate itself to

an arbitrarily set time limit.

I am interested in the discrepancy of a woman for whom the fulfillment of institutional duties had been highest priority for years, and who all of a sudden finds herself being an outsider because of her persistence. Who is confronted with the fact that a system, which she had always believed in and passionately supported, turns against her. "Storm" is about two women, Hannah and Mira, whose lives’ courses overlap for a few days, who both risk a lot and finally go through a decisive development."

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