Russian director Kirill Serebrennikov announces new film on Auschwitz’s ‘angel of death’

Russian director Kirill Serebrennikov is set to release a new film charting the post-war life of Nazi doctor Joseph Mengele, the physician who carried out hundreds of barbaric medical experiments on prisoners in the Auschwitz concentration camp.

The movie will be an adaptation of French novel The Disappearance of Joseph Mengele.

The film’s producer, Ilya Stuart, revealed the plans in an interview with Russian news agency TASS on 19 February. The film will be a collaboration with French producer Charles Gillibert of CG Cinema, who owns the copyright for the book.

Published in 2017 to great acclaim, the novel tracks the life of the Mengele – nicknamed “the angel of death” – in South America, where he lived in hiding after the end of the Second World War. Mengele escaped justice.

Serebrennikov wrote the script for the film himself, with support from the book’s author, Olivier Guez.

This will be Serebrennikov’s fifth film, after Petrov, now in post-production, rockstar biopic Leto (2018), The Student (2016), and Yuri’s Day (2008). Serebrennikov rose to fame as one of Russia’s most innovative theatre directors, as well as for his controversial arrest, deemed by many as a crackdown of the governments on the arts.