THE DISAPPEARANCE OF JOSEF MENGELE – A Monster That Refuses to Disappear

Opelyants' camera, already acclaimed for the stylised black-and-white of Leto, builds for Das Verschwinden a visual language that oscillates between observation and pursuit. The camera follows Mengele often from behind — a cinematic device that produces paranoia without explaining it. We see what Mengele sees and sense what is creeping up behind him. In the Argentinian social scenes, Opelyants opens up space, letting the receptions and dinner parties of the Nazi exile community shimmer in cold light; in the Brazilian jungle scenes, the frame narrows, grows darker, tighter, more claustrophobic. The film's visual arc is the arc of a man whose world is shrinking.

Vladislav Ogay's production design, also nominated, does the reconstructive work a film of this scope demands — Buenos Aires in the fifties, Paraguay under Stroessner, Brazil in the seventies — without ever lapsing into period-piece opulence. Locations were shot in Uruguay and Latvia, not at the original sites, but the illusion works because Ogay does not bet on surfaces but on textures: peeling plaster, dusty shutters, the interior of a world that is forgetting itself.

Tatiana Dolmatovskaya's costumes and Mariia Tutukina's make-up — both nominated — work hand in hand with this aesthetic. Mengele's transformation from groomed gentleman to dishevelled recluse is also a story told in clothes and face: the suits get cheaper, the skin thinner, the beard grows, until in the end an old man drowns off the beach at Bertioga, missed by no one.

The sound design — David Almeida-Ribeiro, Olivier Touche, Olivier Goinard, also nominated — gives the film an acoustic texture that complements the image without duplicating it. The South American soundscapes — jungle noise, street sounds, the static of a radio carrying news from the Eichmann trial — produce an atmosphere of permanent unease. Serebrennikov deliberately works against the silence that many Holocaust films use as a gesture of dignity. His film is loud, overloaded, restless — because Mengele's head is.

Felix von Boehm and Lupa Film, who produced the film, represent a strand of German cinema that thinks internationally without leaving the German funding landscape. The co-production with CG Cinema (France) and Hype Studios extends the radius: Serebrennikov, a Russian in Berlin exile, adapts the novel of a Frenchman about a German living in South America, shot in Latvia and Uruguay, in German, Spanish and Portuguese. That is not a footnote — it is the production reality of a European cinema that treats national borders as what they are for stories of this magnitude: irrelevant.

Serebrennikov himself received the Légion d'honneur in Cannes and spoke there of those who "rot in prison because they believe in something." A director who had to leave his country because he refused to be silent makes a film about a man who left his country because he had done too much. The parallel is not symmetric — it is grotesque, and perhaps that is exactly the point. Serebrennikov is drawn to people who live at the edges of systems that they either fight or serve. Limonov, Tchaikovsky, Mengele — as different as these figures are, they share the quality of refusing to fit the categories the world holds ready for them.

Whether the Deutsche Filmakademie on 29 May trusts a film with seven Lolas that offers its viewers no catharsis is another question. The Disappearance of Josef Mengele competes in the Best Feature Film category with works that are more accessible, more emotional, more inviting. But August Diehl's performance alone — this patient, relentless portrait of a man who considers himself normal while the world around him has long understood what he is — ranks among the strongest acting achievements of German cinema in recent years. And behind Diehl stands an ensemble of international filmmakers whose lines of connection run from Moscow through Berlin and Paris to Montevideo: a network of exile, co-production and artistic necessity that tells far more than a single film can hold.

Mengele drowned in 1979 off the coast of Brazil. He was buried under a false name. Only in 1985 was the body identified. Serebrennikov begins his film with the bones and ends with the water. In between: 135 minutes in which a man does not disappear, however hard he tries. The gap he leaves behind is not one anyone wants to fill. But it is one we have to know.