In 1997, directors
Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman were in Amsterdam for the
premiere of their film The Celluloid
Closet. There they met Dr. Klaus Müller, a German historian
and Euopean Project Director for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial
Museum. Dr. Müller has been researching gay survivors of
Nazi persecution since the early 1990's, and he proposed
a collaboration to help bring this hidden history to international
attention.
Convinced
this history would be lost unless the stories could be recorded
quickly, Rob and Jeffrey joined with producers Janet Cole
and Michael Ehrenzweig to launch the project. They received
television pre-sale commitments from Channel Four Television
in the UK and HBO/Cinemax in the U.S. to help fund the production.
Zero Film in Berlin offered to manage European production
shoots, and also secured a loan from the Berlin-Brandenburg
Film Fund to help pay for the first shoot in October, 1997.
Those funds were matched with U.S. grants from the Columbia
Foundation and several private donors. The second and third
shoots in 1998 were funded by grants from the Open Society
Institute, the Joyce Mertz Gilmore Foundation, the R. Gwin
Follis Foundation, and individual donors in Europe and the
U.S. Production took place in Germany, France, Spain, and
England.
