In person: Marcel Ophüls

Son of the eminent film director Max Ophüls, Marcel Ophüls (*1927) ranks amongst the most important documentary filmmakers since the 1960s. His epic panoramas, such as Le Chagrin et la pitié (1969) or the Oscar-winning Hôtel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie (1988), have changed the very face of non-fiction filmmaking. Five years after the Film Museum had honored him with a retrospective in 2010, Ophüls presented a special screening of a newly restored version of his own personal favorite of all his films, The Memory of Justice (1976). In his introduction, the director – who has compared his work with that of the French writer Honoré de Balzac – recounted the ill fate his film suffered at the hands of the influential American film critic Pauline Kael, while praising the restoration, which for the first time makes it possible to hear the original voices of the on-screen interviewees free from voice-over translation. (In German)