Director's Commentary
»On 11 August, 1999, I boarded the train to Strasbourg in the early morning in Zurich to experience the total solar eclipse that could be observed that day in Alsace and in Southern Germany. I waited among hundreds, maybe even thousands of other people for the great moment. We were lucky. The sun was shining at noon. The sudden darkness, the silence of the birds and people, the sallowness of the light, the coolness that came: it was a magical, uncanny moment, and one understood instinctively why solar eclipses were considered to be signs of divine powers controlling destiny until modern times. Eleven years later I received mail from Lukas Hartmann. The well-known Swiss author sent me his latest novel "Dark Fortune" which begins on this very day. I began to read the book and was immediately under its spell.
A little boy, Yves, with a dark secret, who grows up in a family that does not offer him any real security. His parents' relationship: overshadowed by massive mutual accusations, financial pressure, domestic violence. After the fatal car accident, the boy suddenly finds himself alone, completely defenceless and left to his own devices. And next to him is a psychologist, Eliane, a single parent and autonomous. That the great love in her life didn't really work out: for her it's over. Feelings and desires are professionalised and domesticated in her profession.
These two people now meet on the day of the solar eclipse. What emerges is a tender, unusual love story: the boy instinctively senses that the trauma therapist is capable of understaning his fate. And at the same time he brings her into contact with her own unlived grief in a completely unexpected way. She, who has been commissioned to heal Yves, learns that this boy also becomes a catalyst for her and her family. For Eliane's daughters are also unable to escape this undertow and all of them are subsequently taken to the place of their injuries.
The universal theme of the family, which concerns and affects us all; the border between the professional and private spheres, which is becoming increasingly blurred; the struggle for love, belonging and security, the question of guilt and innocence – what ultimately counts is the strength to face the experience, one's own fate in all its depth. That the Isenheim Altar by Matthias Grünewald in Colmar plays an important role in the novel, a painting from the late Middle Ages that I have known and loved since my own childhood, touched me. And made me twice as pleased.«
Stefan Haupt
Left to right: Lukas Hartmann (author of the novel), Chiara Carla Bär (Alice Hess), Noé Ricklin (Yves Zanini), Eleni Haupt (Eliane Hess), Stefan Haupt (director), Elisa Plüss (Helen Hess) and Rudolf Santschi (producer) during the shooting of "Dark Fortune" in November 2015 in the Museum Unterlinden in Colmar © Triluna Film / Aliocha Merker