Diane Kruger and Dany Boon will star as Beate and Serge Klarsfeld, the German-Jewish couple who tracked down former Gestapo officer Klaus Barbie, in Projet K (working title), the new film from Netflix France, the streamer announced Monday.
Tim Roth will play Barbie in the drama, from French director Yvan Attal (The Accusation, Breaking Point). Attal co-wrote the screenplay together with Laurent Turner, who is known for his work on French Netflix crime series Ganglands.
Projet K follows Beate and Serge Klarsfeld, a German woman and a French Jewish man, whose relationship and shared commitment to justice led them to pursue Barbie, the notorious “Butcher of Lyon” for more than a decade, fighting multiple governments and institutions along the way.
Serge (Boon), born in Bucharest in 1935 to a Jewish family that relocated to France before World War II, survived a roundup of Jews in Nice as a child. His father was later arrested and killed at Auschwitz. Beate (Kruger), born in Berlin in 1939, was the daughter of a Wehrmacht soldier. The couple married in 1963 and become known as Nazi hunters, tracking down former Nazi officials and Vichy collaborators, including Kurt Lischka, Ernst Ehlers, Kurt Asche and Maurice Papon, in addition to Barbie.
Barbie (Roth) served as head of the Gestapo in Lyon during the German occupation of France, where he was responsible for the deportation and torture of thousands of people, including the roundup of Jewish children from a safe house.
After the war, he worked for United States intelligence services before relocating to Bolivia under the alias Klaus Altmann. The Klarsfelds identified Barbie’s location and alias in 1971 and campaigned for his extradition. Despite state opposition, including from the Bolivian government at the time, Barbie was extradited to France in 1983, and stood trial in Lyon. Convicted of crimes against humanity, he was sentenced to life in prison, where he died in 1991.
Barbie reign of terror in Lyon was the focus of Moulin, the Cannes competition film from Son of Saul director László Nemes, with Lars Eidinger playing the Butcher of Lyon and Gilles Lellouche as French Resistance hero Jean Moulin.
The Klarsfelds’ pursuit of Barbie was previously dramatized in the 2008 Canal+ television film La Traque, directed by Laurent Jaoui, in which Attal played Serge Klarsfeld opposite Franka Potente as Beate Klarsfeld.
Attal wrote, directed and starred in Breaking Point (2023) and was the co-writer and director of The Accusation (2021), an adaptation of Karine Tuil’s novel about a rape accusation and its aftermath, which premiered out of competition at the Venice Film Festival in 2021.
Kruger is coming off a starring turn in Fatih Akin post-WW2 drama Amrum, which premiered in Cannes last year, and roles in Paramount+ drama Little Disasters and HBO Max’s Dangerous Liaisons prequel series The Seduction.
Boon, best known for writing, directing and starring in 2008 French box office smash Welcome to the Sticks, had a starring turn in Emmanuel Poulain-Arnaud’s dramedy Regarde, released in French theaters last year.
Oscar-nominee Roth was most recently see opposite Cillian Murphy in Tom Harper’s Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man feature for Netflix.
Attal is producing Projet K through his Films Sous Influence outfit, together with NAC Films’ Antoine Pezet and Jérôme Corcos. The film will be shot in France, Bolivia and Belgium.
