Death in Love

In 1940s Nazi Germany, a young Jewish woman in a Nazi concentration camp saves her own life by seducing the young doctor who performs medical experiments on prisoners. Decades later in the year 1993, that same woman (Jacqueline Bisset) is living in New York City and married with two grown sons.

The two siblings have developed differently under a mother with a long history of erratic behavior. The neurotic younger son (Lukas Haas) can't cope at all, for he still lives at home with his mother and father and is locked in a compulsive, co-dependent relationship with the mother. The older son (Josh Lucas) copes too well. The eldest son is 40 years old, he hides out from the world in erotic escapades with various women, and has a job at a fraudulent modeling agency and acting agency scamming the young and hopeful. He is good at them both... too good but he grows increasingly frightened as his sexual prowess and intellectual diatribes no longer make him feel better.[1]

The film was self-financed by its director Boaz Yakin. Yakin explained "This movie came out of a meeting with a studio...What they wanted to do and what I wanted to do were so far apart, I didn't feel I could continue. So I wrote this for a low-budget production. I ended up financing it with my life savings. No one else chipped in a cent. It's not the kind of thing I can afford to do often. But for this one time, I got to express what I wanted to in a way I found interesting. I feel I got to explore and try some things."[2]

Yakin also described the role that the Holocaust plays in the film "For me, the Holocaust part and what it represents is specific. I saw it as a symbol for a certain kind of pain and violence that people keep inside and end up passing on from generation to generation. I saw it as more about love and its destructive power. The Holocaust is a metaphor for this recurring cycle of pain."[2]

Jacqueline Bisset, who plays the mother, says: "Boaz asked me to play the role of the mother in the film as if she were a wild animal, and in other scenes to play her as moonstruck. This combination is one of the things about the film that captivated me."[3]

It was filmed in 25 days in New York City.[4]

The film first premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2008. In 2008, it was also screened at the Boston Film Festival. The film was screened in Israel on 22 December 2008.[3] This January, the film will be screened at the Atlanta Jewish Film festival.[5] The film is scheduled for a theatrical release in July 2009 and will be distributed by Screen Media films.[6][7][8] The film was released theatrically in New York City and Los Angeles on 17 July 2009.[9][10]

Main

• Josh Lucas as Eldest Son
• Jacqueline Bisset as the Mother
• Lukas Haas as Youngest Son
• Adam Brody as the Talent Agent

Supporting[19][20]

• Morena Baccarin as the Eldest Son's Girlfriend
• Emma Bell as the Young Girl
• Jean Brassard as Young Girl's Father
• Fabrizia Dal Farra as Concentration Camp Woman
• Francis Dumaurier as Old Lawyer
• Seth Fisher as Hotel Receptionist
• Kelli Giddish as Young Mother
• Betty Gilpin as Young Model
• Laura Holloway as Woman #1
• Grace Nassar as Woman #2
• Jamie Hurley as Woman Tending Child
• Vanessa Kai as Asian Woman
• Jacqueline Margolis as The Widow
• Elizabeth Newman as The Waitress
• Rich Odell as Agent
• Jeanne Omlor as Young Girl's Mother
• Stu Richel as the Father
• Nicholas Sireci as Young Brother
• Matt Walton as Young Father
• Carrington Vilmont as the Doctor

• Official website
• Death in Love at IMDb