'The Counterfeiters' proves it's no fake at the Oscars

LONDON, England (CNN) -- With recent offerings ranging from "Downfall" to the "The Pianist," it is hard to imagine a tale about the Holocaust that has not been told before.

Yet, despite its well worn subject matter, Austrian Best Foreign Language Oscar winner "The Counterfeiters" manages to tell an unexpected and riveting story.

The film is the remarkable story of Jewish prisoners, all expert forgers or printers who were forced to take part in a Nazi operation to produce hundreds of millions of fake dollars and pounds.

In an audacious attempt to win the war, the Nazis planned to flood Britain and the U.S. with the phony currency to weaken their economies and also help the German Reich's cash-strapped treasury. In exchange for helping to print the fake money, the inmates lived a luxurious life in the heart of the Sachsenhausen camp.

"The Counterfeiters" is the latest in a wave of German and Austrian films which address their countries' darkest hours with supreme skill and confidence.

This skill is reflected in the rising number of accolades garnered by the film-makers both home and abroad. One example is "The Lives of Others", which won last year's Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film with its treatment of the Stasi -- or secret police -- in 1980s Communist-era East Germany.

"Good Bye, Lenin!", a comedy-drama about the fall of communism in East Germany, was another worldwide hit in 2003, winning 31 awards including the César for Best European film.

And "Nowhere In Africa", a film about German Jewish refugees fleeing to 1930s Africa, also won the foreign-language Oscar winner Oscar in 2002.

For "The Counterfeiters" Austrian director, Stefan Ruzowitzky, who was born in Germany and whose grandparents were Nazi sympathizers, this was a movie he had to make.

"I always felt I should make a statement about this period of time," says the director, who also adapted the screenplay from "The Devil's Workshop," a wartime memoir by Adolf Burger.

Ruzowitzky describes the film as a "caper and adventure movie, a tale of morality set in a concentration camp".

At the heart of "The Counterfeiters" lies an agonizing and complex moral dilemma. The men in the workshop know that if they succeed in their task, they will help the Nazis win the war. However, if they use delaying tactics, they risk execution.

Ruzowitzky says by using elements of suspense and drama to create a tense thriller, he hoped the film would be relevant to a younger generation who sometimes feel detached from the events of theHolocaust.

"I definitely didn't want to make a history lesson," Ruzowitzky told CNN a few days before the Oscar ceremony.

"It's impossible to make a Holocaust movie for today's audience because it's impossible for them to identify with these people. I feel their situation is too extreme.

"But in the case of the counterfeiters, they are living under very privileged circumstances. They have enough to eat, good clothing, and they have the luxury of being able to make moral decisions so I feel it's possible for the audience to identify.

"What I wanted to do was raise universal questions, issues that still apply today."

"The Counterfeiters" know that not far from them is a concentration camp where people are starving to death and getting killed and they don't know how to deal with that morally.

"Are you allowed to play table tennis when right next to you people are being tortured to death?" he asks.

Ruzowitzky says the film also represent interesting parallels to present-day lives.

"This can be compared to our situation. We are living in rich, peaceful, wealthy communities and we know about all the poverty in the world. Can one take an all-inclusive holiday when nearby, people are starving?"

Since winning the Oscar, Ruzowitzky has become, virtually overnight, something of a star in Austria, where opera, classical music and the theater have traditionally had more public support than films.

"Everyone is hysterical in Austria right now. I'm having my 15 minutes," he says

As he took the first Oscar for an Austrian film, Ruzowitzky paid tribute to past Austrian film-makers in his acceptance speech on Sunday

"There have been some great Austrian filmmakers working here," he added.

"Thinking of Billy Wilder, Fred Zinneman, Otto Preminger, most of them had to leave my country because of the Nazis, so it sort of makes sense that the first Austrian movie to win an Oscar is about Nazis' crimes." E-mail to a friend