A film about a politician, a novel about a filmmaker. Two works that dissect the nature of power with precision and nuance: Bangladeshi filmmaker Rezwan Shahriar Sumit’s second feature, Master (2026), winner of the Big Screen Competition at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, and Daniel Kehlmann’s 2023 German novel Lichtspiel (also available in English translation as The Director), longlisted for the International Booker Prize 2026.
Master centres on Jahir (Nasir Uddin Khan), a high-school history teacher who runs for the office of the Chairman in Mohangunj, rural Bangladesh. An idealist loved by one and all, Jahir campaigns for the protection of the forests and improvement of living conditions in Mohangunj. His idealism is matched by political acumen, on ample display when, right after winning the election, Jahir visits the rival candidate in a spectacular gesture of bridge-building.
As Chairman, Jahir sets about solving local problems while managing to keep the opportunistic designs of his businessman friends at bay. But soon, the UNO (Upazila Nirbahi Officer, played by Badhon) of his sub-district, a bureaucrat adjacent to Jahir in power and responsible for land acquisition in the area, proposes a plan for the development of a 5-star hotel in Mohangunj. The project, she says, would not only boost tourism, but will also protect the pristine forests that Jahir has been campaigning for. Only hurdle: it would require the clearance of an illegal slum in Mohanjung, whose population forms Jahir’s core electorate.
Jahir feels beholden to the UNO, who, in addition to supporting his campaign promises, also helps with the arrest of a hired thug threatening his life. What the UNO expects from him, in return, is nothing more than inaction, to keep his underlings in check while the slum is cleared by authorities. With great finesse and good faith, Master charts the gradual corruption of Jahir’s ideals. Jahir doesn’t become so much a terrible person drunk on power as someone who convinces himself that what he does is indeed what he wants to do.
Sumit’s nuanced saga of moral loss finds resonance in Kehlmann’s riveting novel. Mixing concrete biographical details with invention and speculation, Lichtspiel recounts the life of renowned German filmmaker Georg Wilhelm Pabst, known at home as “the Red Pabst” for his left-leaning films from the Weimar era such as the Greta Garbo starrer The Joyless Street (1925) and the controversial Brecht adaptation The Threepenny Opera (1931).
Lichtspiel begins in Hollywood in the 1930s, where Pabst’s career has prematurely ended following a box-office disaster. Confused about his future, the director sets out to Austria, with his wife Trude and son Jakob, to meet his bedridden mother, but finds himself stranded in the country after war breaks out. Here, the Pabsts lead a sorry existence under the yoke of Jerzabek, the coarse caretaker their country house who now calls the shots, having become a minor party member after the annexation of Austria. Lifeline arrives in the form of Kuno Krämer, a mid-level functionary responsible for bringing Pabst back into the German movie industry. Following Krämer’s ‘invitation’, Pabst visits Goebbels in Berlin, and it’s not long before he is directing an imposed, albeit apolitical, film project in Munich.
Paracelsus (1943, G.W. Pabst)
Pabst encounters Nazi power at various levels of the society, in various forms of sophistication and at various degrees of remove from the political centre: in the naked cruelty of the working-class Jerzabek, the slimy, white-collar persuasion of Kuno Krämer, the dangerous vanity of Leni Riefenstahl, whom Pabst is assigned to help out with Tiefland (1954), and of course, Goebbels himself. Kehlmann fleshes out these characters with a great deal of wit and humour, never letting us forget that they all relish their power to send their interlocutor to the camps at the snap of a finger.
Kehlmann bestows the narrative with such unrelenting inner necessity that Pabst’s journey into the heart of darkness feels inevitable, that it becomes hard to determine just at what point the director loses his moral bearings. Why did Pabst agree to make films in the Third Reich? Did he really have a choice? After all, his decisions were all made under duress, under the real threat of arrest and deportation. Pabst is defined not so much by his actions as his continuous accommodation to radically altered circumstances.
Throughout his time in the Reich, Pabst holds onto the belief that this nightmare will blow over and that normal life will resume. But it doesn’t perhaps matter what Pabst believed in; that he participated in the rituals of the fascist machinery, that his arm involuntarily went up in response to Nazi salutes, that his lips uttered the accompanying words, even though he never subscribed to any of this sham, is damning enough. What Pabst undergoes during his years in Germany isn’t just an inner exile – a retreat into an unsullied sanctum sanctorum beyond reproach – but a numbing of his moral consciousness, the formation of a self-protective belief that the iniquities around him would be the same even without his participation.
With stunning clarity, Lichtspiel reveals that civilization yields to barbarism precisely because it is civilization. A wryly funny chapter finds a captive English writer named Rupert Wooster (a stand-in for P.G. Wodehouse, who made broadcasts from Berlin radio in exchange for limited freedom as a German detainee) at the gala premiere of Pabst’s Paracelsus (1943) in Salzburg. When Krämer tells the author that they are on the same side, Wooster is outraged. He stands up in protest, preparing to exit the theatre, but takes his seat again because leaving would inconvenience others seated in the row.
Kehlmann lays bare people’s capacity not just for forgetting, but active self-deception when faced with moral quandaries. In his novel, Pabst spends the last phase of his life ruing a lost masterpiece in The Molander Case (1945), whose negatives he loses on a train to Vienna. Adapted from what Pabst judges to be a terrible novel by regime darling Alfred Karrasch, The Molander Case represents for him a difference in degree, an artistic elevation of dubious source material that sets him philosophically apart and rescues him from collaboration. That it remained lost perhaps only reinforced this self-mythology.
Unlike the filmmaker Pabst, Jahir in Master is in the very business of compromise, saddled as he is with the hard task of finding common ground between competing aspirations and ideals. Sumit’s film remarkably lays out the bargains and quid pro quos involved in day-to-day political decision-making, the ethical tussles involved in solving the most minor of squabbles. Although a tough and cynical work, it doesn’t take the easy way out by demonizing its protagonist. Rather, it unveils his corruption as the very nature of the game.
Master does an equally commendable job of portraying the domestic life of its protagonist, who is incrementally lost to the family as he becomes a public figure. Jahir’s wife Jharna (Zakia Bari Mamo) acts as his conscience keeper, just as Trude does with Pabst, witnessing him succumbing to seemingly harmless enticements of power. After Jahir wins the election, their modest home turns into a veritable public space, with Jharna obliged to ply tea and snacks to everyone who drops by. Trude, on the other hand, experiences her own version of self-censorship when she unwillingly takes part in a Nazi women’s reading club, an echo chamber in which the faintest expression of dissident taste can trigger catastrophic reactions. Over the years, she loses her wits watching Pabst become increasingly self-absorbed to the point of narcissism, preoccupied with nothing more than the completion of his films.
Sumit’s film adopts a pared-back, realist style, observing its characters from up close, but maintaining a degree of objectivity. Lichtspiel, in contrast, presents a highly subjective narrative that unfolds entirely through the perspectives of half-a-dozen characters. There is no authorial comment or editorialization to be found here, very little ambience-setting flab; Kehlmann steps out of the characters’ heads only to describe concrete facts that the characters themselves can perceive. If Master offers a fine-grained character study of novelistic heft, Kehlmann’s novel registers as eminently cinematic, brimming as it does with sharply observed actions and gestures that reveal character and power relations: hands placed on shoulders and elbows, expressing love or threat, glances returned and avoided, telling silences and repetitions in speech, Pabst constantly rubbing his temples, Riefenstahl the actress repeating her movements with robotic precision in every take… It’s a work that cries out for a screen adaptation.
The Seventh Art 