Sales for “I Is Another,” Felix Randau’s German-language historical drama starring Claes Bang and Valerie Pachner, have closed widely ahead of the American Film Market, with buyers across multiple territories picking up the title before the annual rights bazaar gets underway, Hollywood Buzz News has confirmed.
The film, which had its release on August 7, 2026, pairs Bang with Pachner in a psychological two-hander set in the autumn of 1952. Bang plays Felix Kersten, the former massage therapist to SS Reich Leader Heinrich Himmler, while Pachner plays Hedda, a committed journalist who, together with her husband Winfried, ambushes Kersten on a train bound for Oslo.
The premise turns on a question of history and self-invention. According to Kersten’s own account, he helped thousands of concentration camp prisoners to freedom during the Nazi era. Hedda does not buy it. She regards him as a mythmaker, a man spinning fabricated heroic deeds to position himself for the Nobel Peace Prize. What is meant to be an interview becomes a tense, psychological cat-and-mouse game, with Kersten - rhetorically brilliant and armed with what he presents as evidence - facing an opponent who refuses to yield and keeps confronting him with contradictions. As the conversation comes to a head, the announcement of the Nobel Peace Prize winner draws ever closer.
The cast also includes Markus Meyer as Norbert Masur, Susanne Wuest as Irmgard Kersten, Martin Müller as Heinrich Himmler, Timocin Ziegler as Winfried, and Michael Fuith and Till Firit. The film runs 93 minutes and is classified as drama and history.
A Chamber Drama Built for International Buyers
The wide presale result points to continued appetite for mid-budget European historical dramas that lean on performance rather than spectacle. “I Is Another” is largely a confined conversation piece - two figures locked in a train carriage, trading assertions and challenges - which makes its commercial performance abroad notable at a moment when distributors have grown cautious about period titles without obvious franchise hooks.
Bang, who has become one of the more sought-after European actors of his generation, gives the production a recognizable international face, and Pachner’s presence gives it a second. The pairing of the two in a verbal duel is the film’s central selling point, and it is the element buyers are said to be responding to.
The subject matter also carries a built-in hook. Kersten is a figure whose wartime record has been debated for decades, and the film deliberately stages that debate rather than resolving it - Hedda’s skepticism is the engine of the drama, and the audience is placed in the position of weighing the evidence alongside her. That ambiguity is likely to travel well.
Festival and Awards Prospects
With a late-summer release already behind it and a 93-minute running time that makes it easy to program, “I Is Another” now looks to the awards and festival corridor. The Nobel Prize framing gives the film a natural talking point, and Bang’s role offers the kind of morally slippery central performance that awards bodies tend to notice.
The presales give distributor[s] a stronger hand as they plot the film’s next steps, and the AFM timing is no accident: a title that has already been bought across a wide spread of territories arrives at the market with momentum rather than as a question mark.
It’s worth noting that audience ratings for the film remain as yet unestablished, so the commercial case rests for now on critical reception and the strength of its leads rather than on measured public response.
The Bottom Line
“I Is Another” is a tight, talk-driven historical drama about a man who may or may not be a hero, interrogated by a woman who refuses to take him at his word. With Bang and Pachner in the leads and a plot that doubles as a national reckoning, it has found buyers well beyond its home market - and at AFM, that is the number that matters.
Source: Hollywood Reporter
