Directed by Georg Maas, with performances by Juliane Köhler, Liv Ullmann and Katrine Evensen Myrdal, among others, Two lives tells the exciting story of a woman whose personal happiness is put in danger by the collapse of the political system, and, as a consequence, her whole family is affected. Juliane Köhler and Liv Ullmann play mother and daughter in this story based on true events. Ken Duken and Sven Nordin play the male roles. This German-Norwegian production was filmed Bergen (Norway) and in locations in Cologne, Hamburg, Lübeck and Leipzig in Germany. Juliane Köhler and Ken Duken learned Norwegian for the single purpose of playing these characters.
Europe 1990. The Berlin Wall has just been torn town. Katrine grew up in East Germany but has been living in Norway for 20 years. She is a “war daughter” (the fruit of a love story, in the middle of the Second World War, between a Norwegian woman and a German soldier). She is part of a happy family, alongside her mother, her husband, her daughter and her granddaughter. But when a lawyer askes Katrine and her mother to take part, as witnesses, in a trial against the Norwegian State in favour of War children, she refuses. Gradually, a whole web of secrets comes unravelled until Katrine is left bare, and her loved ones have to decide to take a stand; what is more important, the life they have lived together or the lie on which it was based?
