Cate Shortland, Lore (2012)

Discussion Questions

1. What do we learn of Lore’s home life before her parents disappear?

2. How are her father and mother represented?

3. What is her relationship to her parents? Does it differ to that of her siblings?

4. How do others respond to her parents? To what extent does Lore understand their responses in
the early stages of the film?

5. How is the journey represented? To what extent are its fairy tale elements significant?

6. Whom do they encounter on the journey and what is the significance of these encounters with
others?

7. To what extent does violence feature as a part of the children’s experience on the journey and
how does it impact on them? Lore and Thomas also become perpetrators of violence – are they
brutalized by what they experience?

8. To what extent do we experience Lore as having been indoctrinated by Nazi ideology and to what
extent is that indoctrination undone in the course of the film? How does else does she change in the
course of the journey and what promotes any change she undergoes?

9. What is her relationship to her siblings?

10. Why is she attracted to Thomas and how does this relationship develop?

11. Why is Thomas attracted to Lore and why does he want to join her and her siblings? What do we
know about him and his past? Does he change in the course of the film and, if so, how?

12. Why is it significant that he has taken on the identity of a dead Jewish man? Why is it significant
that he turns out not to be Jewish?

13. To what extent are the younger children differentiated and what part do they have to play in the
narrative?

14. What does the grandmother and her home represent in the film?

15. Why does Lore respond differently to the security it represents to the other siblings? Why does
she rebel against the grandmother’s authority? What does her gesture of smashing the ornament
represent?

16. What is the significance of the photos of the dead Jewish man that she looks at and what role do
photographs more generally play in the narrative?

17. What other motifs recur in the film and what is their significance in the narrative?

18. What is striking about the way the film is shot? What is striking about its sound? What is the
impact of its aesthetics on our understanding of the narrative?

18. What, if anything, can this film tell us about German national identity? Is it important that its
director is not German and that the novel is was based on was originally published in English?
19. Is this a film just about the specific historical moment of German defeat in 1945, or has it
something to say that is meaningful beyond that context?