Stephen Fry and Lena Dunham talk ‘personal connection’ with the Holocaust tragicomedy Treasure

Treasure, directed by German director Julia von Heinz, stars Girls’ Lena Dunham alongside Fry as a father-daughter duo who travel together to Poland to delve into their tragic family history.

Dunham, 38, plays New Yorker and journalist Ruth, who has an inquisitive mind and a curiosity to learn more about the trauma of her Jewish heritage and the horrors experienced by her father and his family under Nazi rule. Fry’s Edek, while keen to join his daughter on the trip, is happier concentrating on his new life in the Big Apple, resisting reliving his darkest days and creating unintentionally funny situations as he explores his home country with his American daughter.

“There was a personal connection, growing up with all of my mother’s side of the family being European Jewish,” Fry says.

Lena Dunham as Ruth and Stephen Fry as Edek in Treasure

“My grandmother died before I was born, but my grandfather I knew well: He was Hungarian, and very like Edek – very full of zest, always embarrassing you by falling into conversation with complete strangers but also, notably, always looking forward, and almost over-embracing (his) new country – my grandfather wore tweed suits and Jermyn Street ties, and he would go shooting in the country with aristocrats…”

“What so moved me about the script when I read it,” he adds, “is that Edek was so forward-looking”.

“And then he’s got this daughter that’s grown up in the freest place on Earth, New York City, and now she wants to go back to that place, even though it’s moved on – of course, it’s just emerging from Communism when the story is being told,” Fry says.

“But it rang true in the human sense, which is so important, because films are about humans.

“They’re not about abstract things and ideas, they’re about people.”

Dunham similarly has Jewish heritage, and hers is linked to the very country in which the film is set and filmed.

“It does have, both for Stephen and me, direct correlation to our family history,” she says.

“We both had family members who were murdered in the Holocaust, my family lived in Poland very close to where we shot in Lodz, and that is where my great-great-grandmother emigrated from, that is where my family lived and died, and it felt like an incredibly important place to visit.”

Treasure is released in cinemas on Friday, June 14.