German director Felix Randau hits the Locarno Film Festival’s Piazza Grande this evening with post-World War Two drama I Is Another starring Claes Bang as Heinrich Himmler’s real-life controversial massage therapist Felix Kersten.
In his memoirs, Kersten recounted how he used his influence over the SS founder and Holocaust architect, to halt a planned mass deportation of Dutch citizens as well as save some 60,000 Jewish people being held in concentration camps.
These self-professed humanitarian acts won Kersten accolades in the 1950s – such as the Netherlands’ Grand Cross of the Order of Orange-Nassau – and saw him nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize eight times over that decade but evidence has since come to light casting doubt on his claims.
I Is Another delves into the case through an imagined encounter between Kersten and an investigative journalist on a train to Oslo as the therapist travels to the city with his wife in the expectation that he will finally receive a Nobel Prize.
The journalist, who has her own complex backstory, has uncovered evidence suggesting there are flaws in Kersten’s version of events and wants to confront him on the facts. A psychological game of cat and mouse ensues intercut with flashbacks to Kersten’s interactions and relationship with Himmler across World War Two.
Randau, who was last in Locarno in 2017 with Iceman, set his heart on Danish actor Bang for the role of Kersten from the start as he began developing the project some five years ago.
“Kersten is a shady character, a guy who is in between, who is neither evil or good and that’s the kind of character he likes to play,” Randau tells Deadline. “I also knew – which is a little-known fact – that he speaks near perfect German… he is just perfect for this part because if Claes tells you a lie, you want to believe him.”
Valerie Pachner, whose credits include Terrence Malick’s A Hidden Life and Berlinale 2026 Panorama title Four Minus Three, plays investigative journalist Hedda.
“I’ve been a fan of hers since A Hidden Life… I just sent her the script, and she liked it, and that was that. The only part that was really hard to cast was Heinrich Himmler,” he says, revealing actors were disturbed by the humanizing of the Nazi leader in the script.
“I sent the script to many actors in Germany, famous actors, but they all turned it down, with some even accusing me of providing a stage for Himmler, which is completely ridiculous… If you cancel evil, it grows in the dark, but they had a problem with that.”
“In Germany, these Nazi guys are always portrayed as grotesque kind of characters who could have jumped out of a comic book…. But it’s completely ridiculous because the audience simply pushes these kinds of grotesque characters away… But all these guys, they were all human beings, like you and me, even if it’s hard to accept that. They were full of contradictions… Himmler, he was very, very shy and weak self-confidence stuff like that, and then he was this monster on the other side.”
He credits Casting Suse Marquardt with scouting stage actor Martin Müller for the role.
Randau’s initial curiosity in Kersten was piqued by a meeting some five years ago with French producers over a potential collaboration on a TV series devoted to the exploits of the massage-therapist. Kersten remains a respected figure in France, where his story became the stuff of World War Two legend thanks to the 1960 book ‘The Man with the Miraculous Hands’ by David Kessel.
“I went to Paris and met these guys, and it was nice and then I went back to Berlin and started my own research. In their concept, there was one line that really made me suspicious somehow, and it was something like, ‘If Steven Spielberg had known about Felix Kersten, he would have shot a film about him and not about Oskar Schindler’,” recounts Randau.
“That sounded to me a little bit ridiculous because we all know that Steven Spielberg struggled for about 10 years and hesitated to shoot Schindler’s List… he had an army of assistants and must have known about Felix Kersten,” he continues.
Randau embarked on his own research, consulting archives in Germany, and history experts, to eventually uncover the physiotherapist’s SS membership card and other damning evidence.
“I found out that he wasn’t a hero… He was some kind of impostor or something in between, a shady kind of guy,” says the director, recounting that when he approached the French producers with his findings, they dropped the idea of working with him.
“They said, “Okay, but we are not interested anymore. We want to shoot this hero story, and that’s it.’ I was, as you can imagine, a little bit depressed because I did all this digging and stuff, and then I got the idea, “Okay, then let’s make a movie out of this whole research material, but in a completely different way.”
Randau does not deny that Kersten may have pulled some strings to save some lives, but questions the scale of therapist’s acts as well as his motives, suggesting he was a narcissist and an opportunist who saw the writing was on the wall for Germany after it lost the Battle of Stalingrad and it troops were forced to surrender to Soviet forces in early 1943.
“That’s the point where he started to manipulate Himmler and made him release not 1000s, but some guys from the concentration camps, as well as this mutual whitewashing with the other guys involved in all this stuff, faking a lot of documents for the time after the war. Felix Kersten he did some really good things, but for the wrong reasons. He didn’t do it because he was a nice guy or something, or because of because he believed in humanity or stuff like that. I think he just did it to save his own life,” says the director.
He started writing the screenplay, sending an early draft to Bang, who expressed strong interest in the project, at the same time as getting Marcel Lenz and Claritta Kratochwil at Ostlicht Filmproduktion on board as lead producers in co-production with Wega Film and the support of broadcasters MDR, arte and BR.
“That was the beginning, but to be honest, getting to the bottom of who Kersten really was, nobody can tell. I don’t pretend to tell the truth. My story is based on all the facts that I have. But there may be another truth. I don’t know. He’s like a shimmering marsh flower, a strange kind of guy.”
