In a quiet room deep inside Adolf Hitler’s wartime headquarters, known as the Wolf’s Lair, a group of young women sat down to eat.
The food in front of them looked delicious during a time of hunger, but none of them knew at first whether it might kill them. Their task was brutally simple: taste the dictator’s meals first, then wait to see if they survived.
Shortly before her death in 2012, a 95-year-old German woman revealed she had been one of them. Margot Wölk had spent decades keeping silent about her role as one of the young women forced to taste food prepared for Hitler while he hid at the Wolf’s Lair during the Second World War. She was the only member of the group known to have survived. Her testimony later inspired Rosella Postorino’s 2018 novel At the Wolf’s Table, which has now been adapted for the screen in The Tasters, directed by Silvio Soldini.
For the director, this project arrived with a mixture of intrigue and hesitation. “The producers asked if I would consider directing it,” he recalls. “I didn’t know the novel at the time, but when I read it, I was fascinated. At the same time, I was a little afraid. Period films can sometimes feel false to me as a spectator. I often ask myself why we need to see this story now.” What convinced him was the perspective at the centre of the narrative. “This is not a story about men fighting at the front,” he says. “It’s about women and about war and the cost of war on those left behind. That felt like a very different way to tell the story.”
Although the film is an Italian production, Soldini quickly decided that authenticity demanded the story be told in German. “The novel may have been written by an Italian author, but the story belongs in Germany,” he explains. “Margot Wölk was from Berlin, and for me the only way to make the film feel real was to hear the characters speaking German.”
Casting the seven women at the heart of the story required a wide search. “I didn’t know many young German actresses, so we saw a lot of people,” Soldini says. “There were so many faces. But when the actresses arrived in Italy, where we shot the film, something interesting happened. Within a couple of weeks of rehearsals, they had become friends, and you could feel a chemistry building between them. That connection became very powerful on screen.”
At first, the women are unaware that they could be poisoned. When they refuse to eat, their lives are under threat. “It’s a paradox,” Soldini says of the women. “They find themselves at a moment when there is hunger everywhere, and yet they are eating extremely good, carefully selected food. “They (later) know the food could be poisoned. There is a lot of fear. However, human beings adapt to almost everything; we possess a remarkable capacity. Over time, they became used to the situation.” The film’s visual world was shaped by careful research into photography from the period. “We looked at images from the time and tried to build the atmosphere from there,” Soldini says. “The colours of the costumes, the landscapes, even the fields around the village helped us create that world. It was like reconstructing it.”
Yet while the story is rooted in the past, Soldini believes its themes resonate strongly today. “What interested me was this small microcosm of women living under violence,” he says. “In some ways, it doesn’t feel so distant from the world we live in now. The film reflects something we still see happening.” The film also depicts an SS officer having an affair with one of the women.“That’s what I like about the book,” Soldini says. “He is not just an SS soldier; he falls in love, even if he doesn’t want to, and he misses her when she is not there. He tries to do something, but he doesn’t have the power to act as he would like; he is part of the machine. I liked the idea of showing the character as part of this machine. “There’s a moment of intimacy, which is a reminder that beneath it all, they are just two young people in need of love.”
One notable creative decision was to keep Hitler off-screen. His presence is instead felt through rumour, a radio broadcast, and the distant sound of trains arriving at the Wolf’s Lair. “I never wanted to show him,” Soldini says. “He is only a few kilometres away, but he’s never physically there. We hear the train passing in the night, we hear his voice on the radio. That was enough.”
For Soldini, the absence helps focus the story where it belongs: on the young women caught inside the strange, tense world of the tasters themselves. “I don’t believe people are simply good or evil,” he says. “What interests me is the complexity of human behaviour, what is happening inside people, especially in difficult situations.”
Ultimately, he hopes the film leaves audiences with something more lasting than simple entertainment. “I’ve never thought cinema should only entertain,” he says. “Of course, it can be entertaining, but it should also give you an experience. When you leave the cinema, maybe something stays with you.”
That lingering effect, he believes, is the true power of film. “It’s a little like travelling,” Soldini says. “You go somewhere for a short time, but when you come back, you feel slightly different. If a film can do that, even in two hours, then it has done something worthwhile.”
Tasters is out now
