The Interpreter (2018 film)

The film’s central premise is a journey undertaken by two men linked by a crime they experienced from opposite sides. Ali Ungár, played by Jiří Menzel, believes he has found the address of the German soldier responsible for killing his parents during the Second World War. Instead, he meets Georg, played by Peter Simonischek, the soldier’s son. Georg cannot provide the confession Ali expected, but he joins him in tracing the past.¹

Martin Šulík directed the film from a screenplay developed with Marek Leščák. The production brought together Slovak, Czech, and Austrian institutions and performers, reflecting the story’s movement across former Czechoslovakia and Austria.² Its title refers to Ali’s profession, but also to the broader problem of translating incomplete memories, inherited silence, and competing national histories.

The road journey gradually changes from a search for a perpetrator into an examination of how violence is remembered by families. Ali seeks facts about his murdered parents, while Georg confronts the possibility that his father’s respectable postwar identity concealed participation in Nazi crimes. Their conversations are marked by distrust, awkward humor, and practical dependence rather than easy reconciliation.

The film treats memory as fragmentary and mediated. Testimony, photographs, addresses, and conversations with witnesses provide partial views rather than a single definitive account. This approach places the Holocaust within a local Central European landscape of villages, borders, and disrupted communities, while avoiding the idea that a late apology can erase historical responsibility. The relationship between Ali and Georg remains morally asymmetrical even as cooperation becomes possible.

Peter Simonischek and Jiří Menzel carry the film through contrast: Georg is sociable, mobile, and initially evasive, whereas Ali is guarded and directed by the need to establish what happened. Menzel, internationally known as the director of Closely Watched Trains, gives Ali a restrained physical and emotional presence; Simonischek makes Georg’s charm inseparable from his unease.

Šulík uses the conventions of a buddy film and road movie without turning the material into uncomplicated entertainment. Dry comedy and scenic travel coexist with encounters that expose the persistence of wartime fear and silence. The film premiered in the international festival circuit and was presented at the 68th Berlin International Film Festival.¹ It was also selected as Slovakia’s submission for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, although it did not receive a nomination.³

The film’s less obvious subject is not only perpetrator guilt but the uneven inheritance of history. Ali has a direct, bodily connection to loss, while Georg inherits a name, a family story, and a burden of uncertainty without having committed his father’s crimes. Their differing positions allow the film to ask whether descendants can assume responsibility without claiming ownership of another person’s suffering.

Its multilingual and multinational design is also significant. Slovak, Czech, and German cultural memories meet in the same journey, and translation becomes both a profession and a metaphor for historical interpretation. The film consequently belongs to several traditions at once: Slovak cinema, Holocaust remembrance cinema, and the European coproduction road movie.² Rather than resolving the past through legal or political spectacle, it concentrates on testimony, family archives, and ordinary places where extraordinary crimes occurred.

Martin Šulík

Slovak film director and screenwriter who directed The Interpreter and co-wrote its screenplay.

Jiří Menzel

Czech actor and filmmaker who plays Ali Ungár.

Peter Simonischek

Austrian actor who plays Georg.

Road movie

A film genre structured around travel, with movement serving as a framework for encounters and character change.

Holocaust cinema

Film concerned with the persecution and murder of European Jews by Nazi Germany and its collaborators, as well as memory of those crimes.