The trailer has landed for I Is Another, Felix Randau's post-World War Two drama starring Claes Bang as Heinrich Himmler's controversial massage therapist Felix Kersten, ahead of its world premiere at the Locarno Film Festival this week (Deadline).

Bang, the Danish actor who broke through in Ruben Östlund's The Square, plays a man sitting on an extraordinary and contested claim. Kersten said he used his unusual proximity to Himmler — the architect of the SS and the Holocaust — to save the lives of 60,000 Jewish people in the final days of the war. He also claimed to have helped derail a Nazi plan to deport the entire Dutch population to Eastern Europe. Historians have debated the scale and sincerity of those claims ever since (Deadline).

Randau has framed the story not as a conventional biopic but as a chamber piece on rails. The film is set during an imagined 1952 train journey from Germany to Oslo, where Kersten hopes to receive the Nobel Prize. On board, a journalist named Hedda — played by Valerie Pachner — corners him and demands a one-on-one interview. The resulting interrogation becomes the spine of the film, pressing Kersten to defend the story he has built around himself (Deadline).

This is a return to Locarno for Randau. His 2017 film Iceman, about the survival of a Neolithic clan in the Ötztal Alps more than 5,300 years ago, also premiered at the festival on Lake Maggiore. That earlier work was a nearly wordless, physically visceral drama; I Is Another trades prehistory for the moral murk of the twentieth century's aftermath (Deadline).

The production comes from Ostlicht Filmproduktion, led by Marcel Lenz and Claritta Kratochwil, in co-production with Vienna-based WEGA Film, whose credits include Veit Heiduschka, Christian Bachmann, and Julia Heiduschka. Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk, BR, and Arte collaborated on the project. Beta is handling international sales, having already added the title to its slate at the American Film Market last October, where Deadline published a first-look image of Bang in character (Deadline, October 2025; Deadline, August 2026).

Locarno, one of the oldest film festivals in the world, has long been a launchpad for auteur cinema that sits outside the commercial mainstream — a place where a German-language drama about a Nazi masseur's conscience can find its first audience and, through the sales agents working the festival, potentially reach screens far beyond Switzerland.

I Is Another — German title Ich ist ein Anderer — screens at the Locarno Film Festival on 7 August at 21:30 (Locarno Film Festival).