HANNAS SCHLAFENDE HUNDE

There’s a very good reason why you should let sleeping dogs lie, as 9-year-old Johanna discovers. Grow­ing up a good Catholic girl in the provincial Austrian town of Wels in the late 1960s, she learns from her grandmother her family’s secret: they are Jewish. Life now starts to change, uncomfortably so: the caretaker bullies her, the religion teacher ignores her and her traumatized mother stops talking to people. Both older women know exactly who were the very worst Nazis back then. After the war they reinvented themselves as devout Catholics. Johanna, however, is determined not to hide, she wants to be proud of her heritage and now becomes Hanna. But the “sleeping dogs” are awake, they are starting to bark and they still have their teeth...

Director

ANDREAS GRUBER born in 1954 in Wels/Austria. He is best known for THE QUALITY OF MERCY (1994), which won a special Jury Award in San Sebastian and was the most successful Austrian film at the box office in 1994. A selection of his other award-winning films includes: DEBT OF LOVE (1997), WELCOME HOME (2004), and HANNA’S SLEEPING DOGS (2016), all of which were invited to numerous film festivals across the globe. He is currently a professor at the University of Television and Film (HFF) Munich, where he teaches directing, scripting and production.

Andreas Gruber (photo © enigma film) photos © Kerstin Stelter/enigma film