Watch THE DROWNED GIRL For Free
An opportunity to see our film on art, complicity, and evil in the Nazi film industry
The Drowned Girl was the last work I completed before the COVID-19 panic swept into my life. I finished the script in a hotel room and a coffee shop in Virginia Beach in early 2020, watching cold waves crash into the beach and sipping coffee.
You can watch the film for free on Vimeo this week (Friday February 7 through Monday, February 17).
The cinema of the Third Reich is at the center of The Drowned Girl. The 1940 Nazi propaganda film Jud Süss is among the most notoriously antisemitic dramas ever filmed—and certainly the one that reached the largest audience in Europe. It was shown everywhere in areas controlled by Hitler’s Germany.
A number of books and films have been written about the making of Jud Süss, and the outsized role that Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels had in creating and supervising almost every aspect of its production. The movie was so infamous that its director—Veit Harlan—was put on trial twice in postwar Germany for involvement in its creation.
Yet as I read more deeply about Jud Süss, I was struck by how “ordinary” the nuts and bolts of making it had been. Yes, some of its actors (and even Harlan) tried to evade any involvement. But once they were in, they were in. It was a film, after all. And they went about making Jud Süss in the way that any other film was made.
The friction between this seemingly “normal” act of making a film and the extraordinary moral abyss that flickered on the screens of hundreds of darkened cinemas was what compelled me to write The Drowned Girl.
I also found immense energy in parallels with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust (especially Gretchen’s tale) and the European legends of water spirits (or “Nixies,” in German culture) who rise out of the water in human form to lure those who encounter them into the depths below.
The complicity of actors such as Kristina Söderbaum—who became stars in Nazi film—was a persistent question. She was married to Harlan, and her characters in his films were killed off by drowning for dramatic effect so often that she was dubbed the “Reichswasserleiche” (or, “drowned corpse of the Reich”).
What were they thinking? Or refusing to contemplate?
History tells us that complicity with evil is unevenly punished. Jud Süss was an immense and insidious assault on the foundations of human dignity—and an utter perversion of a narrative art form. Some involved lost their reputations. Yet a number of those who played a part in making Jud Süss somehow managed to survive their connection with that atrocity and continue to work in films, theatre and television in the 1940s and beyond.
We shot The Drowned Girl in New York City, Jersey City, Paterson, NJ and Washington DC in a socially-distanced manner at various times during the COVID-19 catastrophe. (Watch the trailer directly above.)
Annalisa Loeffler plays The Drowned Girl. The film was directed and composed by Pandora Machine’s Andrew Bellware, with performance direction by Paula d’Alessandris (Mind the Gap Theatre). It was produced by Laura Schlachtmeyer.
The Drowned Girl clocks in at 70 minutes. I hope you can find time to watch it. There is much more about the film at our website—including information about our creative team, as well as interviews about why and how we made it.
In one of those interviews, producer Laura Schlachtmeyer sums up why we made the film (and why I wrote it in the first place) with extraordinary clarity and forthrightness:
In entertainment today, we watch a lot of superheroes and supervillains. In those movies, fighting evil is big and splashy and earth-shaking. In The Drowned Girl, we try to show evil on a more human scale. Once we see that the drowned girl doesn't face her own culpability, it opens the door to understanding that many people during her time didn't examine their culpability either.
From there, we can recognize that people generally have trouble seeing how easy it is to enable wrongdoing – and we might even recognize it in ourselves. It's very human, very relatable, this blindness to our own complicity. But it's all that's needed for evil to succeed and spread, in history as well as today.
Watch The Drowned Girl here on Vimeo for free (February 7-17, 2025.)