Jaco Van Dormael Sets English-Language Feature ‘The Magician of Auschwitz’ With Belga Films
deadline.comEXCLUSIVE: Belgian distribution and production company Belga Films Group is reuniting with award-winning director Jaco Van Dormael to produce The Magician of Auschwitz, which will be his first English-language feature in 15 years after shooting mainly in French.
Van Dormael will direct from a screenplay adaptation by Jacob Marx Rice of Portuguese journalist and writer José António Dos Santos’ twin novels ‘The Magician of Auschwitz’ and ‘The Birkenau Scrolls’, about a Portuguese soldier, Russian girl and Jewish magician thrown together in the horror of Auschwitz.
Dos Santos drew the novels from authentic manuscripts written by members of the Sonderkommando during the Holocaust and found hidden near death camp crematoria post-liberation.
They shed light on the harrowing experiences of the members of special command units composed of prisoners who were forced to help run the gas chambers and crematoria. “Dos Santos casts a rare historical spotlight on the delusional beliefs on which the Nazis’ racial theories were based,” says Van Dormael, explaining what interested him in the project. “The SS leaders were fascinated by mysticism and the occult, convinced that the Aryan race was a divine race that had come from Atlantis after six moons had fallen to Earth.
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