THE EMPTY MIRROR, by writer/director Barry Hershey, is a phantasmagoric journey through the looking glass of history into the darkest recesses of the mind of Adolf Hitler. For his debut feature release, award-winning short-format director Barry Hershey (ODYSSEY, LUCIFER: GOD'S MOST BEAUTIFUL ANGEL) has assembled an international cast, including Academy Award-winner Joel Grey (CABARET) as the notorious Joseph Goebbels, and renowned Royal Shakespeare Company member Norman Rodway as the Fuhrer.
Detached from historical time, filmmaker Hershey's surrealist fantasy takes us into the Nazi high command's infamous bunker. But in this imaginary retreat, Adolf Hitler is threatened only by the demons of his own psyche. As he dictates his memoirs, Hitler (Rodway) encounters apparitions of his fiendish confidant, Joseph Goebbels (Grey); his enigmatic mistress, Eva Braun (Danish actress Camilla Soeberg); the mastermind of his military campaigns, Hermann Goehring (Glenn Shadix); and Jewish psychologist, Sigmund Freud (Peter Michael Goetz). Through haunting images, Hitler's stream-of-consciousness soliloquies and his exchanges with his phantom guests, the audience receives a terrifying primer on genius and psychosis, domination and destruction.
Fifty years after he perpetrated some of the most heinous crimes in contemporary history, Adolf Hitler has been simplified into an icon of ultimate evil. Any exploration of Hitler's complexities as a man has become taboo.
But what secrets did that mind hold that might be revelatory to us all? What made it so capable of causing and justifying so much torment? Could an exploration of Hitler's mind reflect back to us insights about ourselves and - in an age of ethnic cleansing, neo-nationalism and hate crimes - the psychology of our times?
A bold re-imaging of Hitler, Barry Hershey's debut feature film THE EMPTY MIRROR defies the Hitler taboo and explores what might have happened inside Adolf Hitler's mind if, after World War II, he had been cut off from his role as Fuhrer and left to contemplate his deeds, the myths he created, and the man he really was.
As Hitler pores over film reels, photographs, even Time Magazine (lamenting that he was only "Man of the Year" once while Roosevelt was chosen three times), he considers and reconsiders the careful creation of his public image, his failed dreams for Germany, his idiosyncratic moral code, the hopes and fears of his past and most of all, his stunning internal contradictions.
Remembering, analyzing and regretting, this Hitler begins to break down, to open up and let loose the fantasies and illusions to which he so stubbornly clung and foisted upon the world. Moving from the blackly comic to the hauntingly emotional, Hitler is visited by a host of characters, real and imagined, ranging from Eva Braun and Joseph Goebbels to Sigmund Freud.
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