“Cold Dog” in the cinema | Pauline Roenneberg: “The film is extremely polarizing”

What happens next for Marianne (Corinna Harfouch) after the death of the family patriarch Hermann? Photo: Milk Pictures What true story is behind “Cold Dog”?

When I was in my early 20s, my grandfather died in his 90s. My grandmother was expecting a family visit from England that day and - I still can't say exactly why - she definitely didn't want the visitor to know that. So we had lunch without my grandfather. It was an absurd situation: everyone wanted to go up to him and we weren't allowed to say that he had already died. We then exaggerated this basic situation and escalated the dynamics.

They didn't have a dialogue book, just a staged treatment. You then developed the characters further with the actors while writing. How did you work with them?

I rehearsed the 99th birthday on a weekend with Corinna Harfouch as Marianne, Victoria Mayer as her daughter Valerie and Lea Drinda as her granddaughter Fanny as well as Karoline Eichhorn and Thomas Mraz as Valerie's half-siblings. We further developed the dynamics – especially the mother-daughter dynamic – and incorporated them into the treatment. We found out over the weekend that Marianne is not the active manipulator I originally thought, but is much more unstable and overwhelmed. Corinna always describes Marianne as a little child who closes her eyes and hopes that everything difficult will just go away. We gave Marianne a signature move. She always whistles when something difficult has happened. Valerie then knows that she has to solve a problem for her mother. Since Valerie is dependent on Fanny's help because of her wheelchair, she then tries to solve the problem. So there is a role reversal over three generations. Lea Drinda plays Fanny so delicately and transparently that what the viewer is feeling is reflected in her face, which adds another layer.

When Fanny asks: “Was grandpa a Nazi?”, history is being reassessed almost as an afterthought…

The thing about the Nazi grandfather came very early in the book. For a long time, we as a society thought that we had dealt with the Third Reich properly. I noticed that we didn't do that within families. It felt like everyone on set said: "I found a photo album like that." Or: "I don't know exactly what my grandparents did." For me, this silence about it is the origin of the problem. This silence develops a feeling of shame and guilt that is passed on to future generations.

The men, not just the dead grandfather Hermann, generally don't have much to say in the film, or do they?

Even if they are silent, they are more powerful in our patriarchal society. Herrmann influences the women's actions even after his death. I found it exciting to ask: How do these women deal with his death as a taboo and with this disharmony externally and internally? The daughters see that their mothers are doing well and want to protect them from stress. The role reversal then automatically leads to total confusion in communication. Nobody says what's going on or names the things that are happening - even your own feelings of grief are simply suppressed. This dynamic says a lot about our society.

Everyone in the cast had a secret and only knew their own parts of the treatment. Filming should have been interesting.

Even the best actors can't get what's about to happen out of their head. Without this knowledge, her game was totally liberated. I have to thank my ensemble incredibly for trusting me. The actors didn't know what the film would tell at the end, but I always knew what I was looking for; I just didn't know what the path to get there would look like.

Pauline Roenneberg was born in Munich in 1984. After studying at the Munich University of Television and Film, she celebrated her first major successes with the award-winning documentary series “Sooner or Later” (2018) and also directed episodes for international documentary series such as “Farm Rebellion”. In 2023 she founded the production company Milk Pictures, with which she produced the black comedy “Cold Dog”.

The focus is on the Hellinger family constellation with a representative figure for each family member. Please tell about this sensitive matter.

We basically did a real lineup on set. Each representative figure had his own biography. We had a trauma psychologist on set and the code word “pineapple” that people could say if they felt like things were getting too bad for them. I have personally experienced how powerful this tool is - even though I am very skeptical about family constellations. The deputies were given a few tips on how to behave on set. For example: If someone blames you, you accept it. Nils Bormann studied the topic for a long time and managed the line-up really phenomenally. After half a day of filming, he felt so bad - we don't know whether it was the pressure or whether he was really sick - that he had to stop filming. I knew I wouldn't get all 14 actors until a year later at the earliest. So I put on Nils Bormann's costume and continued filming. Later I caught up with him on his parts.

You are co-founder of the “Fear eats up cinema” initiative. We don't address many things in German films because we're afraid of criticism. That sounds exactly like this family!

What I just described in the family, that we want to do everything right, is even more obvious in the film industry. “Cold Dog” is extremely polarizing. There are a lot of people in the industry who say, "You can't do an ensemble film where there's no clear main character." People have a desire for clarity. They want to know: Who is “the good one” and who is “the bad one”? And which side are we on? I feel like the more complex the world becomes, the simpler the characters are. We didn't want the viewer to get a simple answer at the end, but rather explore how far you can go with sharp political humor and preserve the ambivalence of the characters. That's why we founded our own production company to implement our unusual concept with the same consistency.

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