Press

A. O. Scott, The New York Times “An unusually matter-of-fact picture of the private and public effects of ordinary evil... Mr. Ludin’s anxious questioning, self-lacerating inquiry represents a powerful countertendency toward full acknowledgement of shared culpability and his quarrel with Barbel is part of what makes this ‘a typical German story.”

Logan Hill, New York Magazine “Documentary films about filmmakers’ bad fathers are a dime a dozen – but this one trumps them all. Hanns Ludin was a Nazi leader of the SA and a Third Reich officer in charge of Slovakia. His son Malte Ludin does an admirable, disturbing, and often bemusing job of reminding us how much can change in one generation, and how difficult it can be to know one’s father, particularly if he was executed for war crimes in 1947.”

Richard Brody, The New Yorker “Courageously probes... the revelations are shocking. The filmmaker doesn’t shrink from debating heatedly with his sisters onscreen or exposing them to their children as liars.”

Jay Carr, amNY “Lacerating and unsparing! As the agonized and agonizing confrontations proceed, and rationale after rationale is demolished, no Ludin (or others like them) can hide inconvenient moral myopia regarding their bloodstained history.”

Jim Ridley, Village Voice “Malte’s discomforting interviews with his siblings, supplemented by surreally matter-of-fact, Zelig-like photos of Hanns in Hilter’s company,
make for gripping and confrontational viewing.”

Kyle Smith, New York Post “Penetrating and symbolically important! Even more fascinating is the CAPTURING THE FRIEDMANS angle of a family arguing over what their father stood for. The family involved is an entire nation. Malte Ludin is a steady guide as he seeks neither to excuse nor to wallow in guilt but simply to face the truth.”

Doris Toumarkine, Film Journal "A must-see for those always eager for more insight into the Nazi era, is also a cautionary tale about the power of denial and of evil that can be practiced by both the banal bureaucrat and the seemingly more refined bourgeois who should know better. Malte Ludin has skillfully combed archives and maneuvered his stern sisters to deliver a complex and hugely personal portrait of an extreme legacy. "

Ken Fox, TV Guide"German filmmaker Malte Ludin's gripping documentary about the father he barely knew is both an extraordinary exercise in family history and an example of what Germans call Vergangenheits-bewaeltigung: "facing the past," particularly the years of Hitler's Third Reich."

Jason Bogdaneris, The L Magazine "Ludin has succeeded in transforming his remarkable, if not unique, perspective into an act of cinematic empathy."

The discovery of the International Film Festival Berlin 2005! No other film was spoken of as much, and none was so passionately discussed!

Georg Seeßlen, EPD-Film, April 05 “As one can study every time it is screened, Malte Ludin’s film triggers processes that intervene in one’s own biography. This film may be the start of a new chapter in the history of film and fascism.”

Agenture France Presse, 18.02.05 "The passionate discussions that followed the premiere in Berlin are sure to continue when '2 or 3 Things' opens across Germany in early April."

Malte Ludin and his father, 1943

DER SPIEGEL, April 4, 05 “Malte Ludin also repeatedly takes his own self-doubts as family chronicler as a theme. What thereby emerges is not only the portrait of a war criminal, but also an impressive, moving study of family ties, responsibility, and guilt.”

Irmgard Hochreither, STERN, April 7, 05 “Malte Ludin has succeeded at what no one before him has manged: to get three generations, all his sisters, nieces, nephews, and brothers-in-law, in front of the camera to ask them about their family history. The result is a very personal, stirring document of the culture of remembrance in Germany.”

Peter Paul Huth, 3 SAT/ZDF, April 05 “2 or 3 Things I Know About Him is – without exaggeration – one of this years’s most important German films. In the personal critical examination of current history and family history, the author achieves a new quality in the cinematic treatment of National Socialism.”

Eva Menasse, FAZ April 7, 05 “This upsetting family portrait, this family autopsy on a living body, should have been titled “The murderers are always the others”, because that is its theme. It is the film for all those born after the war who have asked uncomprehendingly why no one admits to having known while the annihilation of the Jews was running in high gear, and why after the war no one seemed to have been a part of it.”

Wels Lindner, Critic.de, March 05 “Malte Ludin impressively shows how difficult it is to decide between loyalty to a loved one and loyalty to truth.”

Claudia Schwartz, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Feb. 18, 05 “Malte Ludin has taken a personal risk with this film, in which, as the child of a perpetrator, he breaks the silence about his father’s guilt, thereby taking on the responsibility tied to the name Ludin. The result is one of the most explosive contemporary portraits of how the Germans deal with National Socialism to come to the cinema in recent years.”

Dietmar Kammerer, Junge Welt, Feb. 17, 05 “Malte Ludin has made an unmasking film about his family, whose youngest generation still grew up in the belief that Grandpa was a “resistance fighter” in the Nazi Reich.”

Michael Stadler, Abendzeitung, April 14, 05 “The film is highly emotional and gripping because of the courage with which the director faces the dark past of his father – this “perpetrator child” does not even shy away from direct encounters with his father’s former victims. And for the first time, the family of a Nazi is illuminated from close proximity.”

Neues Deutschland, Knut Elstermann, April 11, 05 “2 or 3 Things I Know About Him, surely one of the most important documentary films of recent years, stands against a tendency in German cinema to regard the brown past as nothing more than arbitrary, historical material to play with. Perhaps some viewers will wonder whether a similar unopened wooden chest is in their own cellars.

TIP, April 7, 05 “Outstanding: Director Malte Ludin portrays his family, which belonged to the elite of the Third Reich. A ghostly and parable-like German family album.”

Rüdiger Suchsland, Kölner Stadtanzeiger, April 12, 05 “Because of its theme, a scandalous, breathtaking, explosive film that goes to the heart of the present because it does not address long-dead Nazi “greats”, but how they live on and how the Germans deal with them.”

George Seeßlen, DIE ZEIT, April 6, 05 “2 or 3 Things takes seriously the call for remembrance and reconciliation. The film draws a clear picture of the course of a German family’s political, cultural, and finally psychological illness – without a trace of self-righteousness. One must expose onself to this truthfulness to recognize how much the lie is till to be found in the culture of the perpetrators, long after the perpetrators themselves have vanished.”

Matthias Dell, FREITAG, April 8, 05 “The strategy of minimizing and prettifying continues. Rather, it repeats itself compulsively when, for Barbel, all the Jews killed in her father’s sphere of power must have been partisans whose murder was part and parcel of the logic of war. [...] The talk about their father turns into a failed exorcism of a fateful memory. We are given glimpses of the psychopathology of a German family that are so shattering and agitating that the viewer runs the danger of becoming the victim of transference, to put it psychoanalytically.”

Anke Sterneborg, Süddeutsche Zeitung, April 15, 05 “But Malte Ludin’s interest is not in alloting blame, nor does he take the role of omniscient documentarist or arrogant judge; he brings himself fully into the film and torments himself with all the questions he poses to the others. His film has a rough quality, with its restless images, its handwritten chapter titles, its raw sound track that clatters uncomfortably and hisses and rattles like an icy wind.”

Ulrich Kriest, film-dienst, 7, 05 “And what about Hanns Ludin? Just before the film ends, Malte Ludin’s nephew Fabian finds a productive formula: Hanns Ludin had lived and died for an ideology. That was his life. If the family now tries to erase the dark spots, then it constructs a character, but does not reconstruct the concrete person. Perhaps that is precisely the point: What is important is not Hanns Ludin, but the attempt to turn Hanns Ludin into a “father” in a “fatherless society” (Mitscherlich). This makes 2 or 3 Things I Know About Him a breathtaking fantasy film.”

Lars Friedrich, Kulturreport, ARD, April 10, 05 “2 or 3 Things I Know About Him is a tormenting film – precisely that makes it so impressive. Malte Ludin does not spare himself or his viewers. He shows us how close yesterday is. The skeletons in the closet leave us no peace. Only he who faces the truth can overcome the past.”

Prof. Norbert Frei, Ruhr University Bochum, Dec. 13, 05 “I was especially impressed by how this film, by means of an equally calm and subtle montage technique, allows the image of a National Socialist perpetrator to emerge in the perception of three generations. This documentary film is one of the most fascinating on the theme that one can read or see at this time.”