Marcel Ophüls: Oscar-winning director has died

The Oscar-winning filmmaker Marcel Ophüls (1927-2025) died like. He was 97 years old. Ophüls had “died peacefully on May 24,” confirmed his grandson Andreas-Benjamin Seyfert.

The documentary filmmaker, who had to flee the Nazis twice as a child, devoted himself to research into war -ups and conflicts around the world in his career. Marcel Ophüls was born in Frankfurt am Main in 1927 as the son of the German actress Hilde Wall and the well-known German-Jewish director Max Ophüls. In 1933 the family fled from Germany to France and later via Spain to the USA, where it arrived in 1941.

Ophüls completed the high school and college in Los Angeles and served in 1946 in a theater unit of the US Army in Japan. The family moved back to France in 1950, where Marcel Ophüls worked as an assistant to filmmakers Julien Duvivier and Anatole Litvak. Under the direction of François Truffaut, Ophüls staged part of his film “Love with twenty” in 1962 and in 1964 the crime film “hot plaster” with Jeanne Moreau and Jean-Paul Belmondo. In 1967 he made his first documentary, a 32-hour series about the Munich crisis.

Ophüls was then commissioned by a state-owned French television station to make a documentary about France under the Nazi crew. But when he submitted “the house next door” in 1969, a four and a half hour documentary that revealed the extent of the French collaboration with the Nazis, the broadcaster refused to radiate it. The strip was even banned in France. A broadcaster later explained to a government committee that the film “destroy myths that the French people still need”.

The filmmaker rejected any criticism that he had presented France unfairly and said in 2004 in the “Guardian” interview: “For 40 years I had to listen to all this crap. It was an indictment. He does not try to complain about the French. Who can say that his country would have behaved better under the same circumstances?”

In Germany, ARD showed a shortened version in 1969. The unabridged film first ran at the Berlin International Film Festival in 1972.

Ophüls kept dealing with conflicts in documentary films, including “A Sense of Loss” about the Northern Ireland conflict, “The Memory of Justice” about war editions, “The Troubles We’ve Seen” about war reporting, shot in Sarajevo during siege, and “November Days”, in which he is over the case of communism and the communism Reunification interviewed. For his documentary “Hôtel Terminus: Time and Life of Klaus Barbie” About the Nazi War Criminal, Ophüls received an Oscar for the best documentary in 1989.

The director spent his last years in the south of France. In 2015 he received the Berlinale camera award at the 65th Berlinale.