Righteous Women: Documentaries about Jewish Heroines
Posted on September 8, 2010 at 3:50 pm
George Heymont has an excellent column in the Huffington Post about three new tributes to real-life Jewish heroines, all shown at the recent San Francisco Jewish Film Festival. “Ahead of Time” is the story of Ruth Gruber. The first journalist to enter the Soviet Arctic in 1935, Ruth also traveled to Alaska as a member of the Roosevelt administration in 1942, escorted Holocaust refugees to America in 1944, covered the Nuremberg trials in 1946 and documented the Haganah ship Exodus in 1947. Her relationships with world leaders including Eleanor Roosevelt, President Harry Truman, and David Ben Gurion gave her unique access and insight into the modern history of the Jewish people.
Heymont calls Ingelore “a deeply moving” story of a deaf-mute Holocaust survivor, from the subject’s film-maker son.
Surviving Hitler: A Love Story sounds like a movie, but it really happened. A Jewish teenager and an injured soldier join a doomed plot to kill Hitler (the one portrayed in the Tom Cruise movie, “Valkyrie”). Heymont says,
What makes Wasson’s documentary so touching is that Helmuth was an amateur filmmaker whose 8-mm home movies (including footage from the German home front) survived Germany’s destruction under Hitler’s rule. Whether shooting footage of Jutta in a bathing suit, sipping coffee, or reading a book, his 8-mm films glow with the strength and optimism of young people in love.
“A Film Unfinished” is a new Holocaust documentary featuring never-before-shown footage from the Warsaw Ghetto. The MPAA has given it an “R” rating for “disturbing images of holocaust atrocities including graphic nudity.” This means that no one under 17 can see the film without a parent or guardian and restricts its availability to educational venues. Oscilloscope, which is distributing the film, has set the appeal with the MPAA for Thursday, August 5th. If you want to comment, get in touch with:
Joan Graves
MPAA Ratings Board
Los Angeles
15301 Ventura Blvd., Building E
Sherman Oaks, CA 91403
(818) 995-6600 (main)
(818) 285-4403 (fax)
The film, which will be released August 18th in New York and August 20th in Los Angeles followed by a national rollout, documents an unfinished Nazi propaganda film shot in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1942. (The Warsaw Ghetto, part of the Third Reich’s Final Solution, was the largest and most notorious of the unlivable urban ghettos and a last transit point before deportation to the extermination camps.) Discovered in East German archives after World War II and labeled simply “Ghetto”, the footage quickly became a resource for historians seeking an authentic record of the Warsaw Ghetto. However, the later discovery of long-missing film reel complicated earlier readings of the footage and revealed many of the shots to be staged. A FILM UNFINISHED presents the raw footage in its entirety, carefully noting fictionalized sequences (including a staged dinner party) falsely showing “the good life” enjoyed by Jewish urbanites and probes deep into the making of a now-infamous Nazi propaganda film.
A FILM UNFINISHED had its US Premiere at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival where it won the World Cinema Documentary Editing Award, and has gone on to win the top award at Hot Docs Film Festival and the WGA Screenplay Award at AFI’s Silverdocs Film Festival.
Producer (and Beastie Boy) Adam Yauch says, “This is too important of a historical document to ban from classrooms. While there’s no doubt that Holocaust atrocities are displayed, if teachers feel their students are ready to understand what happened, it’s essential that young people are giving the opportunity to see this film. Why deny them the chance to learn about this critical part of our human history? I understand that the MPAA wants to protect children’s eyes from things that are too overwhelming, but they’ve really gone too far this time..”
Abraham H. Foxman, National Director of the Anti-Defamation League and a Holocaust survivor says, “The further away we get from the years of Holocaust the more necessary it is that our current and future generations understand it. What a shame for today’s teenagers who study world history to be denied viewing A Film Unfinished and seeing first hand the Nazi treatment of Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto. It’s depiction of the lengths to which the Nazis would go to dehumanize Jews is an important teaching tool, not only for its historic content, but for its relevance to today’s world.”
As we lose those whose first-hand experience has been essential in bringing this story to the world, it is even more important to make use of the few recordings that can document what happened during the Holocaust to rebut the deniers and carry the lessons of history to future generations. It is absurd that the MPAA will allow “comic” and “action” violence in a PG-13 film, but not the sober portrayal of historical events.
Oscilloscope co-founder David Fenkel said, “This clearly needs to be rectified. The rating is inconsistent with cultural norms and the film does not use the footage in any exploitative way. The rating will tragically would hinder the exhibition of the film to those who most need to see the film: namely students.”
The greatest documentary film festival in America is Silverdocs, based in the American Film Institute’s gorgeous film exhibition spaces in Silver Spring, Maryland. It is an annual week-long festival that celebrates independent thinking, supports the diverse voices and free expression of independent storytellers, and fosters the power of documentary to enhance our understanding of the world. Anchored in the National Capital Region, where important global and national issues are the daily business, Silverdocs is marked by its relevance, broad intellectual range, and wide public appeal. Silverdocs was created through a unique alliance between AFI and the Discovery Channel, the festival’s Founding Sponsor.
This week’s participating films include:
“Freakonomics,” from the Oscar-winning director of “Taxi to the Dark Side” and the Enron and Jack Abramoff documentaries, and based on the best-seller that uses economics to explain behavior, not just markets.
Stephen Marshall’s “Holy Wars,” the story of two deeply committed men of faith – one a Muslim, the other a Christian – as they travel the world spreading messages they both feel represent “the truth.” The Muslim, an Irish convert living in London, advocates for a global jihad that will ultimately render his faith dominant. The Christian, living in the American heartland, sees Muslims as the enemy and considers it his duty to convert the unenlightened. What would happen if these two men were put in the same room together? This thought-provoking film is sure to push buttons and instigate discussions about the nature not of any one religion, but of extremism and tolerance.
“Making the Boys,” the story of the ground-breaking play (later a movie) “The Boys in the Band,” the first frank and sympathetic portrayal of gay men to achieve mainstream success.
“Restrepo,” from journalists Sebastian Junger (The Perfect Storm, War) and Tim Hetherington, who fully embeded themselves for a year with a platoon of U.S. soldiers stationed in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley. The remote 15-man outpost, “Restrepo”–named after a platoon medic killed in action–is a stronghold of al Qaeda and the Taliban, and arguably one of the U.S. Army’s deadliest challenges. With unprecedented access and unflinching immediacy, “Restrepo” reveals the challenges, triumphs, despair and intense camaraderie among the men who wake up each day under fire, never knowing whether they will make it home again.
“The People Vs. George Lucas” Is there any film-maker with more passionate fans and more passionate critics than the man who gave us Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, and Jar-Jar Binks? One fan, director Alexandre O. Philippe, presents the cases for and against the legendary auteur. At the heart of the matter is this question: Is film the property of the artist who created it or that of the audience that claims and loves it as its own?
“Wo Ai Ni, Mommy” is a quintessentially American story of hope, love, race, conflict, identity, loss, and re-invention. A warm, affectionate Jewish family from New York adopts an eight-year-old girl from China. They change her name to “Faith.” At first, she is lonely and homesick. But within a year, she considers herself American and has to have help from an interpreter when she calls her former foster family back in China via Skype. For me, one of the highlights of this touching and insightful film is when the documentarian cannot help but be drawn out of her role as objective reporter to serve as a liaison in helping to bring Faith and her new family together by translating what they are saying.
If this story wasn’t true, they’d have to invent it. Indeed, they already did. “This is Spinal Tap,” one of the most outrageous, influential, and utterly hilarious movies ever made, is a “mockumentary,” a fake documentary about a heavy metal rock group on a disastrous tour in support of a disastrous new album. “Anvil: The Story of Anvil” is an actual documentary about an actual heavy metal rock group on a disastrous tour in hopes of making a new album and it is hilarious and touching and completely captivating.
Like all great documentaries, this is the story of a passionate dream. Guitarist Steve ‘Lips’ Kudlow and drummer Robb Reiner (not to be confused with one-b Rob Reiner, who directed “This is Spinal Tap”) met as teens in a small town near Toronto and have been performing together for four decades. They had a brief brush with success in the 1970’s, when they performed at a festival with acts that have since gone one to sell hundreds of millions of CDs, and their Metal on Metal album is considered seminal to the genre. But for some reason, they never made it despite subsequent alliterative albums like Worth the Weight and Hard n Heavy. The eternally optimistic Lips has a day job delivering school lunches. But when a European fan calls to say she has booked them on a tour, they drop everything and go. Everything goes wrong. But, as Lips says, at least they have a tour for things to go wrong on.
There are some nice little bows to “Spinal Tap” — a producer whose amps go to 11, a drive by Stonehenge. And the inspired title lets you know from the beginning that it is cheekily subversive, even of its own pretensions. It never takes itself or the band too seriously. But the passion of its characters for rocking out hard and for the partnership they share is perfectly suited to rock as the ultimate affirmation of life in the face of The Man in all forms, from club managers who don’t pay to recording executives who don’t get it to time that goes by too fast. The support of their families and their unquenchable commitment to the music is ineffably moving. It is funny and surprising but filled with heart.
Tomorrow night, I’ll be interviewing Michael Moore at a premiere screening of his new film, “Capitalism: A Love Story.” It comes 20 years after his “Roger & Me” changed the rules for documentaries in every category. He did not pretend to be balanced; he did not hesitate to be irreverent, even laugh-out-loud funny, and — related to the first two points — he shattered box office records. “Roger & Me” focused on the devastation in Moore’s home town of Flint, Michigan, in an economic downturn that seems modest by today’s standards. And Flint shows up again, in a twist that will give the audience goosebumps. Here is Moore on CNN this week. I’ll report on our session on Wednesday.
