Veronica Franz
Severin Fiala

“From Reality to Truth: (Re)Creating History in Film” asks: How do you (re)create history in a film? How do you depict a concrete place and time when only scarce sources convey a vague idea of how the past might have looked like and felt to its contemporaries? How do you avoid reproducing the clichés that historical paintings evoke, showing idealized peasants working in their Sunday best? How do you find images for a time that no longer exists? Is recreating history in film even possible? We’ll follow the path from fact to truth during the production of our film ‘The Devil’s Bath.”‘ 

Free

Co-sponsored by the Manetti Shrem Museum of Art; Cinema and Digital Media; Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies; German and Russian; Global Affairs; Medieval and Early Modern Studies; Religious Studies; Science and Technology Studies; and Sociology, along with generous support from the Lunn Family and the public.

About the Filmmakers

Veronica Franz, born in Vienna in 1965, studied German and philosophy and worked as a journalist. She has also worked as an artistic collaborator with Ulrich Seidl since 1997 and co-wrote the screenplays for all of his films including Dog Days (2001), Import Export (2007), the Paradise trilogy (2012/13) and Wicked Games – Rimini Sparta (2023). In 2003 she also founded the Ulrich Seidl Filmproduktion GmbH with him.

Severin Fiala, born in 1985 in Horn, studied at the Vienna Film Academy. He worked at the Red Cross and celebrated his first success with the award-winning short film Elephant Skin (2009, co-directed with Ulrike Putzer).

The first collaboration between Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala was the international award-winning documentary Kern (premiere: Locarno Film Festival 2012). This was followed by their first joint feature film Goodnight Mommy (2014), which premiered at the Venice Film Festival, won several awards and was put forward by Austria for the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film. A US remake of the film was released internationally by Amazon in 2022 under the same name, starring Naomi Watts. The Lodge, the directing duo’s first English-language feature film, has a prominent cast including US stars Riley Keough and Jaeden Martell. It celebrated its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in 2019. The Devil’s Bath, the historical film by Franz and Fiala — produced by Ulrich Seidl (coproducer: B. Brokemper) — premiered at Berlinale 2024 (and awarded a Silver Bear), is the Austrian entry of the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film 2025.

About the Lecture Series

The Lunn Lectureship commemorates Eugene Lunn, a member of the Davis Department of History who distinguished himself as an incisive scholar and beloved teacher in the field of modern European intellectual history. In his memory, a fund was created to support an annual lecture series bringing notable speakers to campus to address significant cultural issues from a historical perspective.