General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

The Boat Is Full

The Boat Is Full (German: Das Boot ist voll) is a 1981 Swiss drama directed by Markus Imhoof about a group of Jewish refugees who illegally cross into Switzerland in 1942 and pose as a family to evade deportation back to Nazi Germany. A Swiss, West German, and Austrian co-production, it won the Silver Bear at the 1981 Berlin Film Festival and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Original title	Das Boot ist voll (Switzerland, West Germany, Austria, 1980/1981)¹
Director and writer	Markus Imhoof, who also produced; camera by Hans Liechti¹
Literary source	Alfred A. Häsler's 1967 book Das Boot ist voll (The Lifeboat is Full: Switzerland and the Refugees, 1933–1945)³
Awards	Silver Berlin Bear for Outstanding Single Achievement, 1981; Oscar nomination, Best Foreign Language Film²
Principal cast	Tina Engel (Judith Krüger), Curt Bois (Lazar Ostrowskij), Mathias Gnädinger (Franz Flückiger), Renate Steiger (Anna Flückiger), Gerd David (Karl Schneider)¹
Running time and format	2750 m, 100 min, 16mm blown up to 35mm at 1:1.66, Eastmancolor; German release 18 December 1981¹
Historical setting	Switzerland closed its borders to refugees on 13 August 1942; refugees fleeing "only for racial reasons" were not recognized as political refugees⁴

Spoilers

Plot

In late summer 1942, a randomly assembled group of refugees escapes from a Reichsbahn train and crosses the border into Switzerland, a country that has already sealed its borders. The group consists of the Jewish siblings Judith and Olaf, the elderly Viennese Jew Lazar Ostrowskij with his granddaughter Gitty, a French orphan boy named Maurice, and the German army deserter Karl Schneider.¹^•⁵

The innkeeper Anna Flückiger takes them in, and her husband Franz, initially hostile, begins to care for them. Because Swiss authorities do not recognize asylum claims based "only on racial grounds," and only families with children under six may still be admitted, the six strangers form a grotesque fake family to satisfy the immigration exceptions: Judith must present the German soldier as her husband, her brother plays the deserter, and the five-year-old French boy, on whom everything now depends, must feign deafness so he will not speak a language different from his supposed parents.⁴

The deception fails. The village policeman, feeling personally deceived, insists on the deportation, and few villagers find the courage to stop him. Franz manages a ruse that briefly diverts the refugees on their way to the border, but he is jailed as a smuggler, and Judith sees her husband, interned in a Swiss camp, for only two hopeful moments before she, Ostrowskij, and the children are forcibly handed over at the border, where death in the concentration camp Treblinka awaits them.⁴^•¹

Historical background

The film dramatizes Swiss refugee policy during the Second World War. According to the historical essay in Imhoof's pressbook, the Federal Council ordered on 19 August 1938 that the border be closed to refugees from the Third Reich, and on 13 August 1942 the borders were closed to refugees altogether. Orders in force until 12 July 1944 stated that "refugees only for racial reasons, for example Jews, do not count as political refugees" and were to be expelled without further ado, even though the authorities, by the pressbook's account, already had precise knowledge of the mass killings and gassings of Jews.⁴ The pressbook describes the film as telling the long-suppressed truth about Swiss complicity in the deaths of over 30,000 people.⁴

The Swiss Federal Archives record that around 10,000 civilian refugees (classified as "emigrants") reached Switzerland before the war and approximately 51,000 during the war itself, while more than 100,000 military refugees were interned. Refugee policy from this period remains one of the most thoroughly processed yet still controversial chapters of contemporary Swiss history; parliament appointed the Independent Commission of Experts Switzerland – Second World War in December 1996 to investigate it.⁶

Production

Markus Imhoof, a Swiss director who had studied German, art history, and history in Zurich and assisted Leopold Lindtberg at the Schauspielhaus Zürich, based the screenplay on Häsler's 1967 book, one of the first critical examinations of Switzerland's wartime asylum policy.⁷^•³ Shooting ran from July to September 1980 in Siblingen and Diepoldsau. The film was produced by Limbo Film AG with Swiss television (SF DRS), ZDF, and ORF, with George Reinhart as production manager.¹

Reception and awards

At the 31st Berlin International Film Festival in February 1981 the film won the Silver Berlin Bear for Outstanding Single Achievement, recognizing the screenplay and the actors' guidance, along with the FIPRESCI Honorable Mention, the OCIC Award, the C.I.D.A.L.C. Award, and an Interfilm Special Recommendation.²^•⁸ It was screened in the New Directors/New Films series at the Museum of Modern Art, where Janet Maslin of The New York Times called it "something more than a discovery, something in the neighbourhood of a revelation."⁴ The strong American press response brought a distributor and a release in ten American cities in autumn 1981 in the German original with English subtitles.⁴ Roger Ebert, reviewing it in January 1982, called it heartbreaking though not fully satisfying artistically, criticizing abrupt editing and an unconvincing opening train sequence.⁹

Domestic reception was harsher. In Switzerland the film met little understanding in 1981, and Imhoof was denounced as a Nestbeschmutzer, someone who soils his own nest, for his critical view of Swiss refugee policy. SRF's retrospective notes that only after Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List (1993) did the subject become broadly discussable in Switzerland.¹⁰

The film later received the René Clair Award at the David di Donatello Awards in 1982 and was named among the National Board of Review's Top Foreign Films.² A digitally restored version, 103 minutes on DCP, was screened on 16 November 2024 at the cinefest in Hamburg, and Kino Lorber reissued it theatrically and on Blu-ray.¹^•¹¹

Legacy

The film is remembered for challenging the myth of Switzerland's neutrality toward Jews fleeing Nazi Germany, a portrayal that distributors and festival programmers continue to emphasize in restorations and re-releases.¹²^•¹¹ Imhoof returned to the refugee question decades later in the documentaries Eldorado (2018) about migrants crossing the Mediterranean, extending the theme of The Boat Is Full to the present day.⁷

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › War and historical films (individual works) › War action and adventure › War action films released through 1999 › Released 1963 to 1998

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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