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L.A. Jewish Film Festival will showcase Shoah-themed movies

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April 16, 2015

In 1978, the groundbreaking NBC miniseries “Holocaust,” starring Meryl Streep, thrust the topic of the Shoah into the popular culture: “The series was high-profile, it was in English, it had star power, and it basically covered the waterfront of every type of possible survivor’s story,” said Sharon Rivo, executive director of the National Center for Jewish Film. “Millions of viewers tuned in to watch the series here in the United States and in Germany, and that opened up the possibility of further Holocaust films, because producers realized there was box office potential in the subject.

“Holocaust” was not without its detractors: Elie Wiesel, for one, issued a scathing critique of the series at the time, contending that there was no way a fictional film — with commercials, to boot — could possibly represent the horrors of the Shoah, Rivo said. Even so, over the ensuing decades, feature films and documentaries have continued to touch on the period, in part because of the gripping nature of survivors’ stories, and because, “There is a continuing fascination with the issue of evil,” Rivo said.

Landmark films have included Claude Lanzmann’s unprecedented 9 1/2-hour 1985 documentary, “Shoah”; Steven Spielberg’s global phenomenon “Schindler’s List” (1993); Roman Polanski’s Oscar-winning “The Pianist” (2002); and Quentin Tarantino’s revenge fantasy “Inglourious Basterds” (2009). Earlier this year, the Polish film “Ida” won the Academy Award for foreign-language film, and this past month saw the release of “Woman in Gold,” inspired by the true story of a Los Angeles survivor, played in the film by Oscar winner Helen Mirren, who successfully sued the Austrian government for the return of Gustav Klimt paintings that had been stolen from her family by the Nazis.

Defying the notion among some critics that moviegoers are by now suffering from a kind of “Holocaust fatigue,” filmmakers in the United States, Israel and Europe are still producing a steady stream of such movies. The endless trove of new ways to tell the Holocaust story is reflected in the upcoming Los Angeles Jewish Film Festival, taking place April 30 to May 7, in which more than a third of the films touch on the Shoah.

“An Apartment in Berlin”

Several will spotlight the recent trend of exploring what Rivo calls “the aftereffects of the Holocaust”: The documentary “An Apartment in Berlin,” for example, chronicles how three young Israelis re-created the original flat of a Jewish family that had been deported by the Nazis; the French thriller “The Art Dealer” revolves around a journalist who embarks upon a mission to reclaim family paintings stolen by the Third Reich; and Uwe Janson’s German drama “Auf das Leben!” (“To Life!”) features an aging cabaret singer and child survivor who suffers from crippling post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), including terrifying flashbacks that have prompted her to attempt suicide. A chance encounter with a non-Jewish German young man who is battling a chronic, incurable disease begins to change her outlook, as their ensuing friendship teaches both characters to live and love again.

“Auf das Leben (To Life!)”

“A terrible illness can be like an individual’s own Holocaust,” said screenwriter Stephen Glantz (“Wunderkinder”), who is credited for the film’s original story, and who had previously learned about PTSD while working on a project involving the diaries of children who had experienced the Holocaust or more modern genocides. “It really is the enemy. It dehumanizes you, takes away your future and leads you to make decisions about whether to allow people to share in your suffering or not. A bond develops between these two characters, because each, in a way, can understand what the other is going through.”

Felix Moeller’s acclaimed documentary “Forbidden Films” proffers a different kind of exploration of how the past affects the future, specifically, the continuing debate about whether Germany should lift its ban on some 40 Nazi films that had been green-lighted by Hitler’s infamous propaganda chief, Joseph Goebbels.

Moeller said his interest in Goebbels and Third Reich films stems from his own family history; his mother is esteemed German director Margarethe von Trotta, and his paternal grandmother, an ardent Nazi, was so devastated by news of Hitler’s death that she poisoned five of her six children before committing suicide in 1945. (Moeller’s father, who was away from home at the time, was her only surviving child). Goebbels’ wife, Magda, similarly murdered her children before killing herself; and that connection in part, Moeller said, has prompted him to explore Goebbel’s nefarious propaganda movies at least twice in his own documentaries. His 2008 film, “Harlan: In the Shadow of Jew Suss,” examines the most notorious anti-Semitic movie to be produced among 1,200 films released during the Third Reich.

Now “Forbidden Films” shows clips from a number of the approximately 40 still-banned movies from that era. They include an anti-Soviet film that shows Russian soldiers brutally shooting a German family; a cheesy musical in which pilots sing an ode to their Stukas (planes); a pro-euthanasia melodrama, “I Accuse,” in which a doctor kills his chronically ill wife out of kindness; and, of course, anti-Semitic fare, including “The Rothschilds,” about a Jewish family that insidiously sets out to conquer the world; as well as the box-office hit “Jew Suss,” whose director Veit Harlan “was like the German James Cameron of his day,” Moeller said.

Although some of the banned films are available for viewing on the Internet, they may not be screened publicly unless they are accompanied by a scholarly lecture or discussion. The debate over whether to lift the ban is extensively explored in “Forbidden Films.” 

“On the one hand, you have the opinion that that would be dangerous, because the films are still effective, like a slow poisoning,” Moeller said in a telephone interview from his Munich home. “The environment now, for example in France, is so sensitive, with an embattled Jewish community, that it’s absolutely not the right moment to release these films.

“The other point of view is that these movies are historical documents and that people should be allowed to see them,” he continued. “The idea is that the ban creates more curiosity about these films and makes them seem more interesting than they really are.”

A number of the Shoah-themed films in the Los Angeles Jewish Film Festival hail from Israel or Europe, whose filmmakers tend to tackle the subject more often than Americans “because the Holocaust took place on their soil,” Rivo said. Two such films spotlight the Nazi regime through the eyes of children, including the Belgian-Dutch drama “Secrets of War,” in which 12-year-old best friends find their families to be on opposite sides of the conflict; and “Belle & Sebastian,” set in the French Alps, in which a 6-year-old boy and his dog thwart a Nazi plot to capture Jewish refugees fleeing over the mountains to Switzerland.

Other films reflect the trend of capturing testimony of the last survivors before they are gone: The documentary “Dancing Before the Enemy: How a Teenage Boy Fooled the Nazis and Lived” spotlights Polanski’s producer, Gene Gutowski (“Repulsion,” “The Pianist”), who spent the war in hiding in Poland; “Curt Lowens: A Life of Changes” brings to the screen Lowens’ story of escape and resistance in Holland, where he cared for hundreds of Jewish children in hiding; and “Treblinka’s Last Witness,” a WLRN Miami public television documentary about Samuel Willenberg, the last known living survivor of that infamous death camp.

“Treblinka’s Last Witness”

WLRN General Manager John LaBonia had originally envisioned a film that would focus on Treblinka, which “day by day, week by week, was the most lethal and probably the most effective of the Nazi death camps,” said the film’s producer, American Jewish University professor and Holocaust scholar Michael Berenbaum. “Between the camp’s opening on July 23, 1942, and its closing around August 1943, somewhere in the neighborhood of 925,000 Jews were killed in 13 months.” The Nazis had gone to great lengths to cover up their crimes at the camp, digging up the bodies they had buried, burning them in pits and planting over the area to disguise it as farmland, Berenbaum added. Only about 67 Jews who had been interned there are known to have survived the war.

Yet the film’s director, Alan Tomlinson, a former journalist who was raised Anglican near Newcastle in England, said he was initially reluctant to take on the movie when he was approached by LaBonia several years ago. “I was a little nervous. Part of my concern was that the Jewish community might ask what a non-Jew was doing making a Holocaust documentary,” Tomlinson said in an interview from his home in Miami. “But the more important aspect was, I wondered, what else is there to say about the Holocaust? It’s already been done, and I couldn’t imagine what anybody might bring new to it at this stage.”

That changed after Tomlinson looked up Treblinka survivor Willenberg in the Tel Aviv telephone book. During his interviews with the then-90-year-old Willenberg at his apartment, Tomlinson learned that the survivor had been incarcerated at Treblinka for 10 months, when he was spared from the gas chambers after he was assigned to a work detail. On one terrible day, Willenberg discovered that his sisters had been among the victims sent to the camp’s gas chambers. 

Willenberg managed to escape Treblinka during a revolt at the camp in 1943 and eventually fought in the Warsaw Uprising of 1944. Decades later, in Israel, he went on to create bronze sculptures based on the stories of Jews he had encountered at Treblinka. There is the young woman whose hair he had shaved before she was sent to the gas chambers; a World War I veteran who had been decorated with the iron cross, yet who nevertheless was shot immediately after his arrival at the camp; and a mad Jewish girl who arrived at Treblinka wearing a ball gown and high heels.

Tomlinson eventually traveled back to Treblinka with Willenberg to capture more of his story: “I’m now 67, and as a foreign correspondent I’ve covered wars in Central America, the U.S. invasion of Somalia, the Gulf war, the horrors in Haiti and an Ebola epidemic in the Congo,” the director said. “A lot of people over a long time have told me a lot of stories, but nobody has ever told me a story like Samuel’s. It’s a jaw-dropping tale, and his manner of telling it is so compelling. He is not a survivor who is reluctant to go to those dark and painful places. He’s a man who has embraced these experiences almost to the point of obsession. … And when you’re listening to him telling his story, it’s almost like you’re there with him.”

For tickets and information about the Los Angeles Jewish Film Festival, visit lajfilmfest.org.

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