Stella: A Life movie storyline. Tortured and threatened with deportation, the young German Jew Stella is forced into a fateful tragedy: She begins to track down fellow Jews in hiding. Stella, a young German Jew, grows up in Berlin during the rule of the Nazi regime. She dreams of a career as a jazz singer, despite all the repressive measures.
After she is forced to go into hiding with her parents in February 1943, her life turns into a culpable tragedy. Through a betrayal, she is caught by the Gestapo, tortured and becomes a “grabber”: to save herself and her parents from deportation to Auschwitz, Stella begins to systematically betray other Jews. From September 1943 until the end of the war, Stella Goldschlag delivered hundreds of fellow Jews to the Gestapo.
The special relevance of Stella Goldschlag’s story for today’s audience lies in the complexity of the protagonist and the hopelessness of her situation: “‘Stella – A Life’ is a breathtakingly modern story. Her main character could be one of us: she is young, self-confident and in love with herself. This woman is a perpetrator – but also a victim. She forces us into the dilemma of betrayal. “How would we have decided?” says director and writer Kilian Riedhof
Film Review for Stella: A Life
Stella: A Life, German director Kilian Riedhof’s latest feature film which was presented in a world premiere within the Zurich Film Festival’s Gala Premieres section, is the product of meticulous research into the tragic fate of Stella Goldschlag, a young Jewish woman from Berlin who betrayed hundreds of Jews, including close friends, so as to save herself and her family. The ambiguity of this character, the narcissism hiding behind her blond curls and her childlike eyes, and the tragedy of a life marked by deportation and a burning sense of guilt, are the main drivers in Riedhof’s latest film.
Stella Goldschlag, played by the talented and multiple-award-winning actress Paula Beer, has gone down in history as a traitor and a cold and calculating, arch manipulator. What she did was nothing short of cruel, but the desperate situation in which she found herself (as a Jew in Germany during Nazi rule) and the torture she herself suffered, lend her case decided ambiguity and force us to re-examine her actions in a more sympathetic light. As both victim and executioner, femme fatale and girl-next-door, Stella is an incredibly interesting character to dissect, a mysterious figure whom Kilian Riedhof has portrayed without falling into the trap of the good-bad dichotomy. The result is a cruel and historically well-researched movie, led by an actress who’s perfect for her role.
It’s the egocentricity which animates young Stella and which is foregrounded by the director that makes the film especially modern. The story might be set at the height of the Second World War, but the protagonist’s desperate focus on herself and on her own needs, and her determination to live, are characteristics which seem to be a universal theme on screen today.
Much like Stella, many (budding) socialites’ egos have fatally replaced the collective “we”, justifying (almost) any act, no matter how ill-judged. Anything now seems to be acceptable if it’s in the name of our own survival, as if society were nothing but an accumulation of little entities, incapable of interacting and caught in an ongoing competition for a prize which turns out to be nothing but smoke and mirrors.
Beyond the tragedy of her life story, the film stresses Stella’s “normality”, the fact that she’s a young woman like so many others. This is what makes her actions even more abominable and which urges the audience to ask themselves what they would have done in her position. In this sense, the central questions the film asks are how far would a regular person go to save their own skin, and at what point does morality give way to pure opportunism?
Revolving around the theme of guilt, the film offers up an ambiguous character who clings as best she can to the certainties she has constructed, so as not to become the monster everyone imagines. Aesthetically accomplished and well-paced, Stella. A Lifeis a film whose bubbly appearance conceals some very real cruelty, much like its protagonist.
Stella: A Life (2024)
Stella: Ein Leben
Directed by: Kilian Riedhof
Starring: Paula Beer, Bekim Latifi, Damian Hardung, Joel Basman, Maeve Metelka, Nadja Sabersky, Julia Anna Grob, Vincent Koch, Alexander Martschewski, Katja Riemann, Joshua Seelenbinder
Screenplay by: Marc Blöbaum, Jan Braren, Kilian Riedhof
Production Design by: Albrecht Konrad
Cinematography by: Benedict Neuenfels
Film Editing by: Andrea Mertens
Costume Design by: Thomas Oláh
Set Decoration by: Ellen Somnitz, Ruth B. Wilbert
Art Direction by: Matthias Klemme, Maren Schal
Music by: Peter Hinderthür
MPAA Rating: None.
Distributed by: Majestic Filmverleih
Release Date: January 25, 2024
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