EVOLUTION

Director: Kornél Mundruczó
Author: Kornél Mundruczó, Katá Weber
Cast: Padmé Hamdemir, Goya Rego amm
Producers: The Match Factory, Proton Cinema
Co-Producers: ARTE, ZDF, Proton Theatre
Distribution Germany: Port au Prince Pictures

+++ Coming to German cinemas on Aug 25th +++

Over the course of three generations, EVOLUTION follows the fate of a Jewish family from 1945 to the present day. The film is divided into three parts and yet closely interwoven: A little girl is found in an abandoned gas chamber, having miraculously survived. Decades later in Budapest, Éva, already demented, is asked by her daughter Léna for birth certificates and identity papers – but all the official documents she possesses are forged to hide her Jewish origins. And then there is Éva’s grandson Jonás. He has just moved to Berlin with his mother and doesn’t even know who or what he is any more – only this he knows: that as a Jew he felt excluded at school. Éva, Léna, Jonas: grandmother, mother and son, simultaneously past, present and future.

In EVOLUTION, director Kornél Mundruczó and Kata Wéber, who wrote the shockingly moving, but also bitingly ironic and in places highly personal screenplay, get to the bottom of the question of what it means to be Jewish. In impressive images, they describe in three episodes the pain and stigmatisation that are passed on from generation to generation, above all unconsciously.