Director Liliana Cavani stated that the motivation for filming the film came from her investigation of two women survivors in former Nazi concentration camps. In the mid-1960s, when Cavani filmed documentaries such as "History of the Third Reich" and "Women in the Resistance Movement" for Italian television, he conducted a large number of investigations on the survivors of former Nazi concentration camps. The narrative shocked and confused her. A female guerrilla who had stayed in Dachau concentration camp for three years said that when the war ended and life returned to normal, she couldn't help returning to the Dachau concentration camp every year. She couldn't explain her motives, she just said that it was the victim rather than the murderer who returned to the land of sin. Cavani doesn't know why this is. To explain this, one must start from the human subconscious.
Another Milan woman interviewed by Cavani came from a bourgeois family. Although she was not Jewish, she was also detained in Auschwitz. She survived after the war, but became isolated. She did not want to return to a wealthy family, but lived alone in a simple house in the suburbs. She said that what made her most painful was that in the concentration camp, she thoroughly understood her essence. What she couldn't forgive the Nazis was that they made her realize what people can do. Don't think that a victim is innocent, and people also have duality. It was these interviews that gave Cavani the idea of filming the film
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