Morituri (1948 film)

Plot

As the end of the Second World War approaches and the Soviet Red Army is advancing, a group of concentration camp inmates is helped to escape by a Polish doctor. They hide in a wood where they meet other fugitives, who have been there for months, constantly in fear of being discovered. Out of fear of the German army patrols, they do not dare to leave the forest, even as the food supplies run low. The Polish doctor blows up a bridge, attracting the German troops' attention to the forest. The soldiers come perilously close to the hidden fugitives, but in the last moment have to retreat before the approaching Red Army units.

Cast

Production

The title comes from the Latin expression Ave Imperator, morituri te salutant.

Making this film was a very personal project for Artur Brauner. The script is based on an idea of his and this was only the second film made by his company CCC Film.

Exteriors were shot near Berlin in Brandenburg, interiors at the Tempelhof Studios. Principal cinematography was from September 1947 to January 1948.

Reception

The film was first shown on 28 August 1948 at the Venice Film Festival on the Lido di Venezia, Italy.

It premiered in the Waterloo-Theater, Hamburg, Germany on 24 September 1948. It was released at the Neues Scala Kino in Berlin on 16 November 1948. The film was a commercial disaster, with audiences hissing and booing. A theater in Hamburg was vandalized, after which other theater owners, fearful of reprisal by Nazi sympathizers, refused to show the film. It was called Freiwild in Austria.

Morituri was aired on German television station ZDF on 7 April 1991.

In 2009 Artur Brauner donated the film to Yad Vashem along with 20 other Holocaust-related films he had produced.