A scene from 'Die Welle' (The Wave) by Dennis Gansel. Photo (c): Constantin Film Verleih.

After his successful elite Nazi boarding school tale Napola (Before the Fall), German director Dennis Gansel returns to the subject of National Socialism in a school setting in his new film Die Welle (The Wave). The film, set in contemporary Germany, is based on a Todd Strasser novel and a 1981 US TV film that were in turn inspired by real events that took place at a high school in Palo Alto, California in April 1967. At the school, a contemporary history teacher involved his sophomore students in an experiment he called The Third Wave, aiming to explain how millions of Germans let the Nazis get away with what they did. The experiment finally got of hand and had to be stopped.

German films about the country's troubled past century have resulted in quite a few intelligent blockbusters -- if that isn't too much of an oxymoron -- including the Oscar-nominated WWII dramas Der Untergang (Downfall) and Sophie Scholl -- die letzten Tage (Sophie Scholl -- The Final Days), the concentration camp drama Die Fälscher (The Counterfeiters), which was actually more of success abroad than at home and was recently shortlisted for the upcoming Oscars, and even a comedy: the Hitler satire Mein Führer - Die wirklich wahrste Wahrheit über Adolf Hitler (My Führer - The Truly Truest Truth About Adolf Hitler) .

The Oscar-winning drama Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others) and another comedy, Good Bye Lenin! did for the East-West division of the country what the aforementioned films did for WWII, but with one big difference: those films crystalised the impact of the recent past on the present, something which the WWII films have failed to do explicitly so far, despite the fact that the wave of introspective works of art that reflected on the country's own trouble past was jump-started in 1995 by a novel that did just that: Bernard Schlink's The Reader, in which a young boy falls in love with an older woman with a dark past.

Gansel's Die Welle has the potential to be the missing link in this picture, as it is a German drama set in the present that tries to understand what happened in Nazi Germany some sixty years ago. Taken together with Gansel's boarding school-set Napola it might even offer some interesting contrasts about about education and Nazism.

For Die Welle, which has its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival that is currently underway, Gansel has again called on German actor Jürgen Vogel (Silver Bear for Der freie Wille / Free Will), with whom he collaborated on the 2000 TV film Das Phantom. In Die Welle Vogel plays the teacher who conducts the experiment, while Gansel's lead actor from Napola, Max Riemelt, plays one of the students. The film also stars young actors Frederick Lau (Bergkristall) and Jennifer Ulrich (Elementarteilchen / Atomised) and will be released commercially in Germany on March 13.

Related links on the web:

• the official website of Die Welle with the trailer
• the official website of director Dennis Gansel
• the Third Wave on Wikipedia