The German movie was shot between 1931 and 1933 but was not completed until 2016, after the missing reels were located and restored by Swiss film historian Raff Fluri. By the time this restoration took place, all the people who had participated in the original shooting were already dead.
Originally a silent movie, "Das kalte Herz" got a soundtrack for its 2016 restoration. A music score was commissioned from composer Robert Israel, a specialist in the field.
A young film buff from Burgdord in Kanton Bern, Switzerland, Raff Fluri fell upon this lost movie while researching for a biography of his countryman Franz Schnyder, one of the main Swiss filmmakers of the so-called classical age. Schnyder had starred in this film as a young man, while studying on Berlin, and had kept a copy on videotape. The restoration of "Das kalte Herz" thus became another labor of love for Fluri and was completed four years before his book (co-written with Ursula Kähler) "Franz Schnyder - Regisseur der Nation".