Recommendations of the Editorial team
With “Eden” (cinema release: April 3, 2025), director Ron Howard brings the first film adaptation of the spectacular Galapagos affair from 1934 to the cinema. The history of German dropouts that fled to fascism – and from which some kill each other on the Galapagos Islands. In the leading roles: Jude Law (as a German), Vanessa Kirby, (as German) Sydney Sweeney (yes, also German), Daniel Brühl (anyway) and Ana de Armas (as an Austrian!). A conversation about charity and toxic femininity.
“Democracy leads to fascism to war,” says the film. How do you think about?
We see this development in today’s world. Distrust everywhere and dissatisfaction. Perhaps it would help on a small scale to go “off the grid”, to say goodbye to social media. But to flee to an island? We are people. We bring society, our civilization everywhere, no matter how removed or paradise, an island appears.
They quote Nietzsche: “Do I recommend you to love your neighbor? I suggest that you prefer to avoid your neighbor and love those who are most away from you.”
A reflection by the film main character Friedrich Ritter. I don’t necessarily share these thoughts. But I think it says a lot about its character. A few years before the outbreak of the Second World War, various thought patterns collided on the island of Floreana. For immigrants on the Galapagos Island, nature particularly proved to be a problem. But the problem was not the wild nature. But human nature.
Ron Howard Interview:
Jude Law plays Friedrich Ritter as a real German German. Suffered from the constraint, suffer from a writer, throw his typewriter on the floor and hold on with the rifle.
Yes, you can laugh there too. After all, it’s about people who make extreme decisions. Anyone who has self-confidence or let’s call it arrogance to make this kind of emigrant decisions will probably be a very unique person. Vanessa Kirby plays his wife Dora Strauch. Knights and shrubs practiced this type of tantric sex, this kind of kind of systematic attempt to be highly disciplined, to live with nature and to create a kind of strict between them themselves.
Ana de Armas’ figure of the baroness is accused of her beloved toxic relationship behavior – often a male domain.
Two men have therefore expired with cult devotion. A reversal of the circumstances. Usually you can see in a woman whether you like it or not, this kind of leader does not. The Baroness Eloise Bosquet de Wagner Wehrhorn was manipulative. You can learn a lot more about you online. We show real recordings in the credits, but there are much more.
Does our world still offer escapism in an untouched nature?
Maybe not towards a concrete place. But there are denominational and spiritual escapism. The film describes a clash of personalities. From which a thriller develops. The figures ask themselves the question: What gives us strength, what enables us to survive? They live on the island, on which Darwin formulated the idea of the Survival of the Fittest for the first time! The idea of the “origin of the species”! That has a certain irony.
Daniel Brühl and Felix Kammerer are Germans. Why didn’t you occupy the other roles with Germans?
With Daniel I shot “rush” in 2013, he played Niki Lauda. I said to him: For the role in “Eden” you are still a little too young. But if I can do “Eden”, I will ask you. I was enthusiastic about Felix in “Nothing new in the West”, which Daniel Co-produced. I was not looking for nationalities, but actors that I thought could give the film honesty.