This documentary project emerged from a feeling of fascination — our fascination with the story of an impostor who was able to breathe life into accounts of the Nazi horror and the memory of the fight against fascism in general — as well as a need to resist that fascination. This tension is present throughout the film, or, in other words, throughout our journey with Marco back to his German past, after his lie had been publicly exposed. Obviously, he wanted to use us, to rehabilitate himself and find himself back in the spotlight. As for us, even though we generally remain out of shot, we also wanted to use him as an example of something, to discover in him a tragic, or at least tragicomic, character. We weren’t sure it would work. The two aims seemed incompatible, but in the end the shared experience of our trip led to a degree of complicity, perhaps not definitive, but enough to allow us to continue on together, without judging each other. As we saw it, we had to avoid judging the protagonist if we were to capture his fragile status as protagonist/narrator of two equally decisive stories, the true and the false, or if you prefer, the old and the new. The film’s structure is largely based on the interplay between the two: Marco sets off to find his past and undo the old heroic story of the antifascist fighter and member of the Resistance, but he constantly reencounters it. The settings that were the stage for his fabrication and his real, more modest story as an ordinary worker in the Nazi Germany intertwine during the years of the Second World War: Barcelona under Franco’s regime, the city of Metz annexed by the Reich and the military port at Kiel during the German army’s victory on all fronts. We tried to portray a man who strove to correct his self-image and immersed himself in the stories that underlie European historical consciousness. Naturally, we didn’t set out to question historical truth through the figure of a fabulist. At most, we had the opposite intention — to try and capture the banalisation of historical truth, the feebleness of personal memory in the face of media clichés, the banalisation of remembrance so feared by Primo Levi. When Marco arrived at Kiel he was worried about what he would find. Once there, all the doors opened easily. He was able to visit the shipyards he had worked in, he found the grave of an old friend who had saved his life, the jail where he had spent a year of his youth... However, there was something that he couldn’t find. He couldn’t manage to reconstruct himself, fix his identity. It was inevitable that suspicions would re-emerge. They weren’t doubts about his new story, which was quite well-documented, but an impression that he was looking for something else. Not to settle a score, not the truth, but a place from where he could speak again, a way of reinserting himself into the big story, History in capital letters. It became increasingly clear that this place could only be Flossenbürg concentration camp, which Marco hadn’t originally planned to revisit. But in the end, we went. The camp was the place where, since the seventies, he had forged his identity as a member of the Resistance and his relationship as a comrade with the ex-deportees who he hadn’t seen again since his lie had been made public... There, thought Marco, he’d be able to settle his old account, to understand. Was it one last picaresque action, or the first time he would really confront his truth? Whatever the case, he was aware that it was a farewell. While the public man, trapped in his lie, had reached the end of his journey, the new, flesh and blood man silently followed the wire fences of the old Lager, now a museum. Santiago Fillol y Lucas Vermal Barcelona, Marzo de 2009