The German Doctor (aka “Wakolda”) is Argentina’s candidate for the foreign–language Oscar race.
Puenzo’s third film, which is set in the 1960s, turns on a World War II criminal known worldwide, who has helped inform modern ideas on the figure of the evil scientist: Unrepentant Nazi torturer Josef Mengele, Auschwitz’s “Angel of Death.” He stays in Patagonia with an Argentinean family of German stock whose mother is about to give birth to twins (a Mengele fixation).
The film played at this year’s Cannes Un Certain Regard and will be released in the U.S. by the Samuel Goldwyn Company.
“The German Doctor” marks the second year in a row that a production from Historias Cinematograficas, the Puenzos’ family firm, is Argentina’s Academy Award submission after Benjamin Avila’s “Clandestine Childhood” was submitted in 2012.