"My works don't tell political stories. They rather document a political alertness, a clairaudience for certain constellations. My films, each for themselves, are generally useless for the purpose of a position or theory." - Thomas Harlan

"I am the son of my parents. That is a disaster. It has determined me", declares author, dramaturge and filmmaker Thomas Harlan (1929-2010) in the interview book 'Hitler war meine Mitgift'. Harlan, who grew up in Nazi-Germany, once shared a table with Adolf Hitler, accompanied by both of his parents, actress Hilde Körber and filmmaker Veit Harlan, the director of the infamous anti-Semitic propaganda film Jud Süß. It is a heritage that he could never get rid of and the appalled son would take upon himself the sins of his repent-less father. His whole life Harlan would strive for truth as the only possible justice: he spent years in the Polish archives, looking for proofs of German war crimes; in Rome he joined the radical leftist group "La Lotta Continue" and travelled to wherever the spirit of revolt and revolution emerged. In 1975 Harlan was in Portugal where, in the aftermath of the Carnation Revolution, various movements  of resistance and initiatives of land occupation were developing. That is where he shot his first film, a documentary about the occupation of the Torre Bela estate, which according to critic Serge Daney represents a condensation of "all the key ideas - materialised, embodied - of political and theoretical leftism from the past decade". His following film project started as a reaction to the "German Autumn" of 1977. Wundkanal explores the relation between the events in the Stammheim prison, where several members of the RAF died in suspicious circumstances, and the logic of Nazi terror. The shooting of the film, in which war criminal Alfred Filbert played a hardly fictionalised version of himself, appears in Robert Kramer's documentary Notre Nazi, revealing a staggering portrait of a filmmaker who, in an attempt to come to terms with his past, takes on the methods of the enemy and in doing so becomes his own worst enemy; and thus an old sin is replaced by a new one. 

Thomas Harlan, Wundkanal, DE/FR, 1984, video, 107’

Robert Kramer, Notre Nazi, DE/FR, 1984, video, 116’

“My film is perhaps another fiction: the story of a certain T., son of the greatest Nazi filmmaker, and himself a film director. All his life he has tried to undo his past. Today he is shooting a fiction film, he has given the main role to a Nazi war criminal who is more or less the same age. By this act T. releases a whole torrent of unforeseeable energy which sweeps the set and even more than the set.” - Robert Kramer

"For the first time in the history of cinema, said Louis Marcolles in le Monde (30 August 1984), two films were shot against each other; the first being fiction, the second unmasking this fiction; the first mystifying its subject (crime), the second outrageously unveiling its methods of manipulation. Yet, both films were produced by the same producer, both in the outskirts of Paris and with two directors who are complementary to each other: Thomas Harlan, The German and Robert Kramer, the American. Wundkanal by Thomas Harlan is a fiction film about a killer. Notre Nazi by Robert Kramer kills the fiction. But the Killer is a real-life killer, and never before in the history of cinema did an audience get so intimate with a murderer like doctor Alfred Filbert, did an audience get so close to his face and to his skin. Indeed, Alfred Filibert – the archetypal gentel German grandpa – belonged to the inner circle of nine men who in Hitler’s terror state planned the Holocaust; so in the film he appears as an actor and as himself, playing his own part in history. In Wundkanal – a quiet oratorio of long sequence shots – four terrorists interrogate a war (and peace) criminal they kidknapped in Alsatia, trying to drive him to commit suicide. In Notre Nazi the actor playing a part in a fiction film becomes a real human being again, of flesh and blood. The members of the film crex discover their sorrow and their pity as they live through unimaginable moments of violence and despair. Two inseperable films – lashing out against each other as ruthlessly as a couple divoring publicly – ’The scandal’, as Il Messagero put it, ‘of the 1984 Venice Film festival’.

During Courtisane festival 2012 Thomas Harlan's Torre Bela will be shown alongside José Filipe Costa's Linha Vermelha .