Germany’s Beta Cinema has racked up multiple territory deals for its Joseph Goebbels biopic Führer and Seducer ahead of the film’s premiere at the European Film Market in Berlin later this week. Beta signed all-rights territorial deals with Spain (A Contracorriente), Portugal (Films4You), Scandinavia (Mis Label), Benelux (Dutch Film Works), Czech Republic (Donart Film), former Yugoslavia (Discovery) Japan (AT Entertainment) and Australia & New Zealand (Moving Story Entertainment) for the feature. Wild Bunch will release the film in the German-speaking territories.
Directed by filmmaker/writer/historian Joachim A. Lang, who helmed 2018’s Mack The Knife — Brecht’s Threepenny Film with Lars Eidinger, Führer and Seducer stars Robert Stadlober as Goebbels, Austrian actor Fritz Karl (Sisi) as Adolf Hitler and Franziska Weisz (The Swarm) as Goebbels’ wife Magda. Stadlober also stars in Josef Hader’s Panorama title Andrea Gets A Divorce, which will have its world premiere at the Berlinale this year.
The film follows Goebbels over the last seven years of his life, working at Hitler’s side to create and drive the Nazis antisemitic propaganda machine, including producing such infamous films as Jud Süß and Der ewige Jude, in order to prepare the German people for the mass murder of Jews. After the defeat at Stalingrad and the situation becoming increasingly hopeless in late 1944, Goebbels plans the most radical propaganda act, his last staging, with Hitler’s suicide, of the murder of his family and his own suicide.
Führer and Seducer is produced by Till Derenbach and Michael Souvignier for Zeitsprung Pictures (Kleo) and co-produced with Sandra Dujmovic of regional public broadcaster SWR, Maya spol.s.r.o. and Act/HQ.
Beta is screening the film at the European Film Market in Berlin on Thursday, Feb 15 at 11 a.m. at CinemaxX10 and on Saturday, Feb. 17 at 4:20 p.m. at CinemaxX12.