The film was thought lost until a near-complete tinted nitrate print with German intertitles was found by Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek, Berlin in 2001. The print was in good physical condition and identified by Helmut Regel in Koblenz. A duplicate negative was made, where Swedish intertitles were inserted, and a new print was struck in 2003. Prints of the German version were also made from the duplicate negative, before the insertion of Swedish titles.
The discovery of Hämnaren is nothing short of sensational, being now the oldest surviving film by Stiller. The shooting took place in April 1915, and was Stiller’s 23rd film since his directorial debut in 1912. A young student renounces a Jewish girl with whom he has had an affair, and their baby boy is raised by the girl’s cousin, a money-lender who many years later finds a way to avenge the injustice inflicted upon his family. True, the film is somewhat more static than other Stiller films, but it has a tense, dramatic atmosphere, and there is some highly evocative on-location footage, for instance at the cemetery. Stiller was born in Helsinki by Russian-Jewish parents, and Hämnaren is the only of the director’s more than forty films that takes place in a Jewish setting. When the young student, later to become a priest, refuses to marry the pregnant girl, he writes her a letter bluntly stating that marriage is impossible because she is a Jew and he is a Christian. In the German version he simply states that marriage would interfere with his studies. In fact, the titles in the German version differ significantly not only from the original Swedish titles but also from the titles in the English version. Stiller planned one more film in a Jewish setting. But after several rewritings of the script, the 1921 De landsflyktige instead came to depict the lives of Russian emigrés in Western Europe.

Jon Wengström