Actor Saskia Rosendahl poses for a photo as she promotes the movie "Lore" during the 2012 Toronto International Film Festival in Toronto on Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2012. The new film "Lore" looks at the Second World War through eyes not often depicted in cinema — that of the children of Nazi SS parents. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Chris Young

TORONTO - The new film "Lore" looks at the Second World War through eyes not often depicted in cinema — that of the children of Nazi SS parents. Director Cate Shortland didn't want it to have the usual dark and dreary look of dramas set in that time.

Instead, star Saskia Rosendahl and her castmates are seen traversing lush, green landscapes — captured in striking cinematography — as their characters try to find their grandmother after their parents are taken into Allied custody.

"We were really influenced by the whole idea of the esthetic nature of National Socialism and the connection to nature within that ideology," Shortland, who also co-wrote the feature, said in an interview at last September's Toronto International Film Festival.

"The other thing is that nature has a way of continuing, so even when horrendous things happen, nature — unless it's being bombarded — will continue."

It's a jarring juxtaposition Shortland was struck by when she watched Claude Lanzmann's Holocaust documentary "Shoah" and saw survivors talk about the landscape.

"They take Claude Lanzmann to a field and the man says to him, 'Claude, can you see this beautiful field and the trees and the birds?' And Claude's like, 'Yeah,' and he said, 'This is what it was like when they were murdering us,'" said Shortland.

"So for me, that was kind of important, that we didn't art-direct. ... It was like, this was the reality of Germany, and Germany is beautiful."

"Lore" opens Friday at TIFF Bell Lightbox in Toronto.

The German-language feature, winner of several festival awards and Australia's entry for the 2013 best foreign language Oscar, is adapted from the Man Booker Prize-nominated novel "The Dark Room" by Rachel Seiffert.

Australian-based Shortland, who drew raves for her 2004 debut feature-length film "Somersault" starring Sam Worthington and Abbie Cornish, said she was given the book by a producer at the Edinburgh International Film Festival. She'd previously studied fascism and is "interested in totalitarianism as a way of dehumanizing and what it does to people," so the material struck a chord.

"It's a very beautiful book and very powerful so as soon as I read it I was interested," said Shortland. "And I was really interested in the perspective of it, because it's kind of this great humanist work but it doesn't shy away from the horror of what has happened."

German-born Rosendahl deftly plays the 14-year-old titular character, who leads her four younger siblings on a gruelling trek for refuge after their parents are captured by Allied Forces in 1945.

Joining them on their journey is a mysterious refugee named Thomas (Kai-Peter Malina), who is but one of many reminders that their country is changing.

"In Germany we often deal with this topic in school, so you're used to thinking about the Second World War and the period afterwards, and my grandmother told us a lot about her own experiences at this time," said Rosendahl.

"But this perspective was completely new."

Shortland co-wrote the film with Robin Mukherjee and worked with German script editor Franz Rodenkirchen.

"He was just really stringent and really strict and we weren't going to make the film sentimental — it had to be really emotionally true but not saccharine," said Shortland of Rodenkirchen.

"And he constantly was pushing me to look at the psychology of the characters and to leave space in the film for the audience."

She shot it over a period of nine weeks in eastern and southern Germany, taking the cast on almost the same journey the kids in the story went on.

"All my bruises and ... all the damages on my body were half-real because it was quite hard," said Rosendahl. "But it helped me to get into her character, to have this nature all around us all the time."

"She was constantly getting stung by wasps," added Shortland, who praised Rosendahl's honesty and intelligence onscreen, calling her "a bloody good actor."

"There's a scene in the film where she's got a big bruise on her face and that was actually a wasp bite, and that happened quite a bit."

Shortland also brought her own realism to the film, using photographs of her husband's German-Jewish family in a scene that features a glimpse inside Thomas's wallet.

"So it was really personal, the film, for me," said Shortland. "The way we approached it was, it's not about the victims in a way but they were always with us.

"It's about the perpetrators but it felt like those people were all around us."

News from © The Canadian Press, 2013