The historical drama Wolfskinder is set in East Prussia (present-day northern Poland) in 1946.

The film by first-time feature writer-director Rick Ostermann follows fictional orphaned brothers Hans (13-year-old Levin Liam) and Fritz (10-year-old Patrick Lorenczat) as they and other children struggle to survive in the wilderness.

But while fictional, Wolfskinder is based on the real-life history of orphaned German youth (known as “Wolf Children”) who were left to fend for themselves when the Soviet Red Army took over the region after World War II and began brutalizing and killing ethnic Germans.

I sat down in Chicago last week at the Chicago International Film Festival to talk with German-born Ostermann about Wolfskinder.

Wolfskinder is playing various film festivals.

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How did you get interested in this idea, in the history of the Wolfskinder?

Rick Ostermann: The idea came because my mother and her family and her brother ran away from the soldiers during the Second World War, so I wanted to get in touch with my family background. I read something about the Wolfskinder and got more and more interested. I read some books and then met and interviewed some of these people.

Even as elderly adults, are these things still painful for the real Wolfskinder to talk about?

Ostermann: One woman was very nice to talk to me, but she told me “I’m going to tell this story once more for you, but then I’m not going to tell it again.” It’s so emotional for them – they cry and feel sad.

And the stories are harder than what you see in the film – they told me stuff you really don’t want to know and don’t want to see in the cinema. It’s really emotional for them. Many don’t want to talk about it – they say, “It’s done, I’ve left it behind.”

The film’s themes touch on how nationality and family comprise identity, but when I was watching the film, I was never thinking of them as “German children,” just as children.

Ostermann: That’s what I wanted audience to feel. These aren’t German kids—they could be all kids all over the world. It’s about identity, your family, who you are, and who you belong to. First it’s your family, then it’s your nation.

I didn’t want this to be a political film, so when we started doing the costumes, we thought about whether Hans should wear something that marks him as having been in the Hitler Youth, like a uniform. And I thought no, let’s just let the audience see them as kids and leave all that political stuff behind and concentrate on the kids.

When I was researching the Wolfskinder, I saw a present-day comment on a history page asking, “How could anyone do this to children?” I wanted to reply, “Have you been paying attention to the news… ever?” Sadly things like this have always happened to children during war and are happening right now all over the world.

Ostermann: I wanted to make the story about kids as victims of war, and because I’m German and I have a connection to this part of history, I did this story. But it’s an example for kids everywhere, in America, in Syria, in Europe, Iran, Iraq, everywhere. What happens to kids in war is terrible, so the film should make you think about that. About what war does to children.

The film also shows some of the brutal things these children also did. Do you feel they sometimes acted cruelly or brutally out of pure survival instinct or because they were poisoned by the cruelty and brutality they’d seen and experienced during the war?

Ostermann: Both, I think – it’s meant to be both. That’s what I was thinking about. These characters are about 14, they’ve grown up in the war and have seen terrible stuff. So it’s just to survive.

It’s also interesting how Fritz, the younger brother, makes the decisions and leads the way in terms of survival, while Hans, the older brother, is initially weaker, more reticent.

Ostermann: I have brothers and friends, and the younger ones would always be tougher than the older ones. In the film Hans is my hero for the story, and I wanted him to have this journey and to grow up into the hero, so he has to start very low, unable to make any decisions at the beginning. The younger brother makes all the decisions. But by the end, Hans is making decisions. So we could have this hero’s journey. He rises up to something.

Obviously nature and images of nature play a huge role in the film.

Ostermann: It is a story about kids surviving in nature, so the nature element was there in the beginning when I started on this idea. I told my director of photography that the second main character in the film must be nature.

One of the things I said to the whole crew was whenever you find any animals, small or big, keep them for a moment. So the butterfly and the frog all came along because someone on the set found it and we shot it.

And the weather is usually bright, warm, and full of sunshine. They’re struggling to survive during what would normally be beautiful days.

Ostermann: I talked a lot about this with my producers and they thought maybe it would be better to shoot it in winter, when you have nature also being cruel – it’s cold, there’s nothing to eat. But I thought maybe it would be too much. I wanted to have this beautiful nature and put it together with what the kids have to go through. Nature is dangerous for them, but it’s the only hope they have to survive.

Throughout, Hans is reading out loud from Darwin’s Origin of the Species.

Ostermann: Right. I didn’t choose it because it’s about the survival of the fittest, but because it’s a book about nature and living in nature.

We’re certainly seeing a lot of survival films in theaters these days. Do you think their prevalence reflects societal uncertainty about politics, economics, or world conflict?

Ostermann: I think about surviving in nature – I like to be in nature as often as I can, so I’m interested in our relationship with nature. We’re all settled down now with our phones and Facebook, but nature doesn’t care, it’s just you and nature.

We have so much stuff going on around us with phones and television and the Internet, I think we’re starting to look back at what’s really important if you want to survive.

You’ve said, “there is no need for a historical glorification of the victims of the Second World War.”

Ostermann: As a German, it was difficult to make the movie about German victims of the war. It’s a hard topic. I know what happened in the Second World War, I know what our nation did and the terrible things it did – I know all this. But now three generations after it, I think we can start looking at it from different angles, as long as we always keep in mind what happened.

If we hadn’t caused the war, these kids wouldn’t be in this situation – I know that. But I feel we should have a look at what happened there, in other stories. I think there is a change in the minds of Germans and Europeans; that you can think about these different things now.