The Conference

Feature film directed by Matti Geschenneck ('In Times of Fading Light', 'Boxhagener Platz'), which could be seen in the 2022 edition of the Official Section of the BCN Film Fest. Film that was produced on the occasion of the 80th anniversary of the historic Wannsee Conference, held by the Nazi Party on January 20, 1942, in the suburbs of Wannsee, in the province of Berlin. The purpose of the conference was to discuss the so-called Final Solution to the Jewish question. A copy of the conference minutes was only found after the end of World War II and the film is based on those minutes.

On January 20, 1942, in a mansion located in Wannsee, a Berlin suburb, a conference took place that, in just 90 minutes, changed the course of history. That day, Reinhard Heyndrich (Philipp Hochmair), head of the Reich Central Security Office and Himmler's right-hand man, Commander-in-Chief of the SS, summoned a large group of Nazi leaders (ministerial representatives, members of the Gestapo and governors of the occupied territories) to explain to them and gain their adherence to the so-called 'Final Solution on the Jewish Question'. At that meeting a systematic plan was established for the arrest, confinement and elimination of the entire European Jewish population, some eleven million people. Likewise, a mass extermination method based on industrial efficiency models was outlined.

That conclave was documented by the minutes written by one of the organizers of the event, Adolf Eichmann (Johannes Allmayer), lieutenant colonel in charge of Jewish affairs within the Reich Central Security Office and author of the so-called Wannsee Protocols. Those minutes, of which only a copy is currently preserved, were the ones that inspired the screenwriters Magnus Vattrodt and Paul Mommertz to write 'The Conference'.

A production of Constantin Film AG, Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen (ZDF) whose premiere in its native Germany was not in theaters but on the ZDF channel, to later be seen on the German channel's on-demand service, achieving a total of almost seven million viewers.