Empress of the Screen - The Sissi Film Trilogy

To this day they are still Christmas classics: The trilogy of "Sissi" films by Ernst Marischka have been drawing people to their television sets for almost 70 years.

For the first time, we are offering a peek behind the scenes at the origin story of this classic of Habsburg Romanticism. The costumes of the young empress can still be admired today and the trilogy has left all sorts of traces in real life. Inextricably linked to the success of the "Sissi" films is the rise of its biggest star, Romy Schneider. Like a catapult, the just 16-year-old soars up to the Olympus of the local acting circles, but suffers all her life from the typecasting and merging of herself as a person with the myth of the deceased empress. Her youth is sacrificed to the films, her life and career also under the strict control of her mother, Magda Schneider, who plays her mother in the films.