A film about the man who massaged one of the Holocaust's chief architects — and then claimed to have secretly sabotaged him — will have its world premiere on Friday, August 7, in the Piazza Grande program of the 79th Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland. The Hollywood Reporter

Danish actor Claes Bang plays Felix Kersten, the real-life massage therapist to Nazi SS leader Heinrich Himmler. The film, titled I Is Another (German: Ich Ist ein Anderer), is written and directed by German film-maker Felix Randau, whose previous feature was the Alpine drama Iceman. The Hollywood Reporter

Set in 1952, the story follows a journalist named Hedda, played by Austrian actress Valerie Pachner, who ambushes Kersten and his wife on a train. She doubts the heroic story Kersten has been telling the world about himself — that he used his proximity to Himmler to save lives and undermine the Nazi regime. The film weighs whether he was genuinely a saviour or a self-mythologising impostor. The Hollywood Reporter

The cast also includes Susanne Wuest as Kersten's wife Irmgard, Timocin Ziegler as Hedda's husband Winfried, and Martin Müller as Himmler. Behind the camera, Sebastian Thaler served as cinematographer and Joana Scrinzi edited the film. The Hollywood Reporter

The real Kersten has long been a contested figure. The Guardian, in a feature published August 5, describes him as Himmler's "magic Buddha" — a man whose postwar reputation rested largely on his own account of whispering humanitarian advice into the ear of a mass murderer during massage sessions. The Guardian

Randau came to the material after declining a French proposal to direct a miniseries about Kersten. He turned it down because he could not accept the straightforward hero narrative the producers wanted. The feature film instead keeps the question open. The Hollywood Reporter

A trailer released earlier this week offered the first footage of Bang in the role; Deadline described his character as Himmler's "double-dealing massage therapist." Deadline

Beta Cinema is handling international sales and will launch the title to buyers at the American Film Market — the AFM, an industry marketplace where sales agents pitch completed films and projects to distributors from around the world. The company first boarded the project and unveiled a still in October 2025. Algemeiner

The film is produced by Anke Neugebauer alongside Marcel Lenz and Claritta Kratochwil of Ostlicht Filmproduktion, and Veit Heiduschka of WEGA Film. Locarno has scheduled the Piazza Grande screening for August 7 at 21:30. Deadline

For a festival that prides itself on open-air screenings in one of Europe's largest town squares, a historical drama about truth, complicity, and self-invention is a fitting Piazza Grande centrepiece — a film about a man who insisted he was heroic, and the woman who refused to take him at his word.