‘The Passport Forger’: The ingenuity of the brave artist

For his fourth feature film, Maggie Peren makes a breakthrough and opts for historical drama with “The Passport Forger”. Based on true events, it narrates the graphic artist’s youth Cioma Schönhausa Jew who lived in Berlin during World War II and who managed to save his life (and that of thousands of Jews) due to its ability to forge passports. A story that emphasizes another perspective on what lived in one of the worst episodes in recent history.

“The Passport Forger” chooses to count a far from obvious story about a production set in the Second World War. First, it shows the few Jews who had not yet been deported to concentration camps in Berlin in 1941, i.e. in the middle of the war. The reason is explained on the tape of him, Schönhaus worked in a welder and had a work permit which temporarily prevented him from suffering the same fate as his parents.

But the effects of the Holocaust are being felt, with gestures such as seeing that the floor where the young man lives with his best friend was the family residence and that he is forbidden access to certain areas of the apartment, where the effects are found personal data available. the parents of Schönhaus and which became the property of the Nazis. Add to that that the young man could be sent to a concentration camp at any moment, leaving that atmosphere of uncertainty in much of the footage on the tape.

The film has the charisma of Louis Hofmann, internationally known for the Netflix series ‘Dark’, as one of its main virtues. Contrasting and surprising is the lively and naive character of his character, who seems not to realize the danger in which he lives until almost the end of the film. This disconcerting attitude means that there are sequences that cause a disconnect with what is narrated.

A story based on true events that deserved more study

Nor does it help that the film’s few assets get noticed, which it abuses internal scenes and characters without backgrounds. Peren, who also signed the screenplay, fails to create sequences that can replace the streets of the German capital, nor is he able to fully perceive that atmosphere of contained terror. To a large extent, he is to blame. that carefree character of both the protagonist and his best friend, who seem to realize that, at any moment, they could be deported to certain death.

Nor is it rated as its ability to forge identity documents He helped thousands of Jews escape the massacre, anonymous figures who remain in the background, even though the Jewish Resistance was a fact and not sufficiently recognized in cinema.

Undoubtedly, ‘The Passport Forger’ serves to uncover different stories about the Second World War, because, after all, Schönhaus escaped from the clutches of Nazism by crossing the border from Germany into Switzerland with a false passport and disguised as a Wehrmacht soldier (the mimicry is the only element that manages to stand out in the tape instead). Nonetheless, there is a lack of greater depth in a story that, without a doubt, gave more.

Note: 6

The best: The charisma of Louis Hofmann.

Worse: The feeling of being faced with a minor product despite what it says.