A film about the Austrian abduction case of Natascha Kampusch premiered Monday in Vienna, pointing not only to her strength during eight years of captivity, but to the way she has since taken control of her life.
Real-life Kampusch, 25, strode down the red carpet, after having spent the past weeks promoting the German production entitled 3,096 Days.
Director Sherry Hormann chose to include the whole range of suffering that Kampusch had to endure after she was abducted by Wolfgang Priklopil at the age of 10 and locked up in a tiny cellar under his house.
"Her story is a success story," Hormann told dpa. "Her strength was greater than his powers, and her story transcends this individual case."
Priklopil, played by the Dane Thure Lindhardt, punishes Kampusch through isolation and threats. He deprives her of food, and he hits and rapes her.
The film captures not only the cellar's claustrophobic atmosphere, but also Kampusch's efforts survive by giving in to Priklopil when necessary, and by developing the ability to watch herself from a distance, as if she had stepped out of her body.
Kampusch is played by British actresses Amelia Pidgeon as a girl and by Antonia Campbell-Hughes as a teenager, who shed 18 kilograms to play the role.
The film ends at the point when Kampusch managed to escape in an unnoticed moment in 2006.
But the young woman has proved since then that wants to be in control of her story, rather than the media.
She started doing interviews less than a month after her escape, has authored a memoir that forms the basis for the film, and seemed omnipresent in the media in the past days as she drummed up publicity for the film.
"To remain silent would only have made me seem more like a victim," she told the German magazine