Director Stefan Ruzowitzky’s intention of adapting Adolf Burger’s memoir, The Devil’s Workshop, was to tell a story about the Holocaust “focus[ing] on the moral plight of the prisoners.” The result is The Counterfeiters, the Academy Award-winner for Best Foreign Film this year and a well-crafted, compelling work. Based on a true story, the film centers on a group of Jewish prisoners who are forced to produce counterfeit money to fund the Nazi war effort.

The original title of the film, The Counterfeiter, likely referred to the story’s protagonist, Salomon Sorowitsch, the most skilled counterfeiter of his time. Sorowitsch’s code of conduct is what some might call flexible - he is, after all, a criminal and, at the film’s start, is not one to do favors for strangers. However, once captured, he refuses to turn in a “mate,” even as the Nazi officers pressure him to report on the prisoner who is sabotaging the prints.

Sorowitsch’s code lies somewhere on the spectrum between Burger’s and Herzog’s - the former an idealistic revolutionary willing to die for his cause, the latter a Nazi official happy to kill to ensure his own comforts. The story raises a score of ethical questions of individual versus communal responsibility and cultural assimilation; Sorowitsch tells a friend at the film’s start, “You must adapt or die.”

As is typical in Holocaust literature and film, the secular Jew eventually comes to own his Jewish heritage, if only to re-claim it from the Nazis who use his Jewishness to de-humanize him. In that respect, the film is familiar, but in many other ways, The Counterfeiters is unique, most notably because you never know what you want to happen. Should the sabotage be continued? Do we want our heroes to live, or die for the most worthy of causes?

Ruzowitzky’s direction is skillful, never playing to our emotions: the film is moving precisely because the story is presented so plainly. The performances from Karl Markovics, as Sorowitsch, and Devid Striesow, as Sturbannfuhrer Herzog, are especially impressive. Markovics holds the film together with his thoughtful performance and his sad, expressive face - one that seems made for sorrow. As for Striesow, he plays the repellant character of Herzog without judgment, never once asking for our hatred or our sympathy.

The Counterfeiters is a near-perfect film, one that engages the audience both emotionally and intellectually, all through the power and strength of the story and its characters.

With a release date of August 5th, the DVD and Blu-Ray Disc Bonus Features Include:

• An English-language commentary track
• Interviews with director Ruzowitzky, as well as the counterfeiters on which the film is based
• A making-of segment
• Deleted scenes

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