Controversial Hitler movie up for Oscar

Can a film that humanises Adolf Hitler win an Oscar? Oliver Hirschbiegel hopes so.

He is the director of Downfall (Der Untergang), a film about the last days of Hitler's life that was nominated for an Oscar this week as one of five foreign language films.

Also nominated were the Swedish All It Is In Heaven, The Chorus from France, Spain's The Sea Inside, and Yesterday, the first South African film ever nominated.

Few films have been as controversial in modern-day Germany as Downfall, which stars Swiss actor Bruno Ganz as Hitler.

Some critics in Germany savaged it, though the US film industry newspaper Variety hailed it as "a powerful Gotterdammerung [twilight of the gods] centred on the last 10 days of the Fuhrer."

Hirschbiegel said he was surprised by the nomination.

"My film is very controversial. Are we as film-makers allowed to depict Hitler as a man or are we supposed to depict him as a monster?

"We owe it to the victims to show that this was not a demon from hell but a man born in Austria and raised in Germany. I am very proud of this movie. It is my best work."

Variety said the film would "undoubtedly raise discussion in some quarters for its coolly objective, humanistic approach to the characters and subject matter. But as thoughtful entertainment, cast in depth and going for the long burn, this is classy upscale fare."

Perhaps the best-known of the foreign film candidates is The Sea Inside, about a quadriplegic's 30-year battle to take his own life. It has won several prizes, including a Golden Globe for best foreign language film and a best actor prize for Javier Bardem at the Venice Film Festival.

Yesterday, a film in Zulu about the struggles of a woman in a small village fighting HIV/Aids, became the first South African movie nominated for a foreign language movie Oscar.

It was written and directed by Darrell James Roodt and intended in part to be used as a teaching tool to combat the spread of Aids in South African rural communities.

Roodt said he hoped the nomination would open the way for other movies to be made in ethnic languages such as Zulu.

"In the first 100 years [of South African cinema] this is the first proper Zulu movie," he said.

The film was made with the support of the Nelson Mandela Foundation and HBO. This month Mandela announced that his son Makgatho had died of Aids.

- REUTERS