Interview: Arnon Goldfinger of “The Flat”

Posted on November 1, 2012 at 8:00 am

After documentary filmmaker Arnon Goldfinger’s grandmother died at age 97 in Israel, he brought a film crew to her apartment where she and his grandfather lived from the time they immigrated to what was then called Palestine just before World War II. He was fascinated by their home, which seventy years later looked as though it had been transplanted from their birthplace in Germany. The books on the shelves were in German. They always spoke German in their home. Most of their lives were lived in Israel, but they lived as though they were still in Berlin.

Goldfinger thought he would learn something about his grandparents as the family sorted through their belongings. But he could never have imagined what he would find or where it would take him. His grandmother had saved issues of one of the most virulently anti-Semitic newspapers distributed in Nazi Germany. This discovery led to a journey that illuminated one of the strangest friendships imaginable, represented by an artifact that is almost unthinkable — a coin with a Jewish star on one side and a Nazi swastika on the other. The movie also focuses on the strain this inquiry put on Goldfinger’s relationship with his mother, who was almost as passionate about not finding out the answers to his questions as Goldfinger was about seeking them.

I spoke to Goldfinger when he was in Washington, D.C. to show the film, which opens tomorrow.

What did you think you were going to film?

To be honest, I just wanted to be there with the camera and document the world I knew was going to disappear very quickly. I thought it would be an even quicker process. I knew this flat all my life and I had an ambivalent feeling toward it. On the one hand, I had an attraction to this world, to this culture, to those books, to the secrets, the mystery. On the other hand, as an Israeli it was so foreign, so German, so connected to the tragic happenings in the Holocaust. It was only later I had an idea to make a film, but even then the idea was just something very short. People would ask, “What can you learn about someone from what they leave behind?” This shows you can learn a lot.

What does your mother think about the movie?

I was very afraid of course. Our relationship was close before and if it would stay like that, it would be fine. But I was surprised. It brought us closer. She was very supportive of the film. After the first screening, when she first saw it, she said she saw it was important for her, too. When her friends saw the film, they said to her, “We didn’t know, either. We didn’t ask.” She felt that she was not alone.

Why was your mother reluctant to know more?

She was really raised in a German house. I remember as a kid, hearing her argue with her parents in German. But when she went out of the flat, she was in Tel Aviv, the Mediterranean combined with bohemian, a place of vibrance. She lived two lives. But like all of the people of her age, she wanted to leave the past behind her, as you see when you look at her flat, not even any dust from the past. Your house is the place you want to live in. And she wanted to live with with barriers to all the historical items. Before I made the film I thought it was her character. But now I understand it’s a barrier from all the pain and sorrow.

You met with Edda, the daughter of the Nazi couple who were your grandparents’ friends. Tell me something about your impressions.

They were lovely people, very friendly, welcoming, warm. That made it harder. If they were nasty it would have been easier for me. During my research I would think, “Maybe it’s not possible, maybe it’s not right” that this friendship existed between my grandparents and the Nazis. If I called someone out of the blue and said “My grandparents knew your parents, I would not recognize one name.” But the way she recognized it so immediately, the way she knew and was so glad to hear from me in such an open way and with such memories — I don’t remember even one gift my parents’ friends gave me — but for her, she remembered so much.

What about her father, the man who was your grandparents’ friend while having an important role in the Nazi party?

I found much more about him than what is in the film. It was important to say that he did not live the Nazi party. He was involved in anti-Semitic propaganda. But he wanted to stay in contact with Jews. I found all kinds of other things about him, nothing that would change your mind, no smoking gun, but you could ask yourself, “Did he have an alternative?” The way to describe what happened was this. Nobody knew what Hitler wanted, but everybody knew if they did something Hitler did not want, it’s the end. It was a classic regime of terror. There’s a book called Alone in Berlin that described life in the war. It’s horrible. I am a Jew; I don’t so much identify with them, but still I can understand and ask the question, “Could he do something?” If you look at his career, you won’t find him in the concentration camps. He is in the headquarters, spying, thinking. For me, it’s enough.

One of the most shocking moments for me was when Edda told me that she knew my family had lost someone in the concentration camps. She did not have the details right. She thought it was my grandfather’s mother, not my grandmother’s mother. She’s a little mistaken with the details but it shows that she and therefore her parents knew some of what happened. That means my grandparents were sitting over there in the garden where we were, discussing the death of someone from their family with a man who was a Nazi. Did they ask him if he received their letter asking for help? Did he tell them he could not help them? There were a lot of lies over there.

My favorite character in the movie was your grandmother’s friend. What a beautiful face. I felt I knew your grandmother by seeing her friend.

She was my grandmother’s closest friend and like an aunt to me. When I first approached her, she did not want to be filmed. She was the only one, and I could not understand why. It took me almost a year to persuade her. But she said, “I will give you half an hour, but you come alone.” I told her I had to bring a cameraman and a sound man, and she said, “No, no, no.” In the end, it was only me and the cameraman. I figured she would see it is not threatening and she would let me stay longer. The cameraman said, “Be careful. Remember who you are dealing with. Ask the questions you want in the beginning not as usual at the end.” After 32 minutes she told me it is enough. Three months later she passed away. Her daughter was so happy that I captured her in her beauty. There’s such elegance in those characters.

Why did your grandmother keep the Der Angriff newspapers even though they were filled with anti-Semitic propaganda?

There was something emotional about it, a memory from a very, very important event in their life. The idea was to keep an eye on the Nazi and push him to include more Zionist material in his story. There may be a possibility my grandfather even edited the article. It was something very vivid at the time and maybe she forgot about it. She never opened it again. Maybe she forgot about it.

What are you going to do with them?

I think maybe give them to the Zionist archive in Jerusalem or to Yad Vashem.

Why does this movie touch people so deeply?

The film is telling an amazing story about a Nazi and a Jew, but really it is a movie about family, what you know about your family, what you want to know, what you can know. Those questions anyone can identify with, especially in America, a place of immigrants. Some people who see the movie tell me, “I want to ask my parents more about our history.” And some say, “I need to get rid of a lot of the things in my house!”

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The Debt

Posted on August 30, 2011 at 6:04 pm

A+

Lowest Recommended Age:	Adult
MPAA Rating:	Rated R for some violence and language
Profanity:	Some strong and offensive language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking, smoking, drugs
Violence/ Scariness:	Characters in peril, injured, and killed, some graphic images, references to Holocaust atrocities
Diversity Issues:	A theme of the movie
Date Released to Theaters:	August 31, 2011
Date Released to DVD:	December 6, 2011
Amazon.com ASIN:	B003Y5H4Y8

Stories are linear. Part of what gives them their power is that we jettison the details that are distracting or unimportant. But real life is messy. That may not be as compelling, but is honest. As we are told in “The Man Who Shots Liberty Valance,” “When the truth becomes legend, print the legend.” And sometimes the legend becomes the truth.

That is the story of “The Debt.” It begins in 1997, when a woman is celebrating the publication of her book, which tells the story of her parents’ daring capture of a Nazi war criminal named Vogel in East Germany three decades before. Her parents, now divorced, are Rachel Singer (Helen Mirren) and Stephan Gold (Tom Wilkenson). Rachel still has a scar on her cheek from the prisoner’s attack on her when he tried to escape. She shot him to keep him from getting away.

Then we go back to the 1960’s, when Rachel (Jessica Chastain) passes through the Berlin Wall on her first assignment as a Mossad agent. The man they are looking for was responsible for atrocities that were a grotesque version of medical experiments during the war. Now he is a gynecologist under the name Bernhardt (the Danish actor Jesper Christensen), and Rachel is assigned to visit him as a patient, posing as the wife of another agent, David Peretz (Sam Worthington), under the direction of their leader, Stephan (Marton Csokas). The first time through, we saw the story they told. Now we see what really happened, and then we will see how the three of them, in their 60’s, finish the story.

It is a tense thriller with some action and a lot of suspense, especially the war of nerves as Bernhardt and the three young agents are stuck in a grimy apartment for days, essentially prisoners of each other. The young agents are rattled by Vogel’s coolness and manipulation. And then, decades later, their story starts to unravel and they have to finish what they started.

The movie works very well as a thriller that benefits from some ambitious aspirations and superb performances from Christensen, Wilkenson, and Mirren. But it spins out of control in the last 20 minutes, sacrificing story for action and losing much of its gritty momentum.

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Interview: John Madden of ‘The Debt’

Posted on August 30, 2011 at 8:00 am

John Madden, director of “Shakespeare in Love” and “Proof,” came to Washington, D.C. to talk about his newest film, “The Debt.” It is a remake of an Israeli film about three Mossad agents who are revered as heroes for capturing a Nazi war criminal, who was then killed trying to escape. The film moves back and forth in time between the capture in the 1960’s and 1997, when a book about it, written by the daughter of two of the agents, is published. We spoke about the challenge of casting a villain,

How did you become involved in a remake of an Israeli film?

An agent called Ari Emanuel, the brother of Rahm represents Matthew Vaughn and the producer of the original film. Because it was in Hebrew it did not get a release anywhere else, but they thought it was an interesting project to reconsider or adapt for a wider audience. So Matthew wrote a script that was faithful to the original story but it was structurally a little different. The original film cross-cuts more between the two time frames. He sent it to me, so the first way I came across the material in that form. I thought it a very compelling and interesting story which I immediately wanted to unravel. I did watch the original film — it’s the raw material and I wanted to honor that. But I hoped it would not be very good! It would be easier. But it was good, very arresting. It didn’t daunt me or arrest me. It excited me because I could see it was a very powerful piece. We inevitably developed the story in different ways, with different emphasis. The material is sufficiently strong and charged and complex that as a director you need to find your own way through it.

I’m always interested in what goes into casting the villain, especially in this film where you have an actor who is unknown in the US and who gives a spectacular performance.

Jesper Christensen plays the villain. He’s Danish and fantastically highly regarded and respected actor with a very long list of stage and movie credits. I didn’t want an audience to be able to say immediately, “Oh, here’s the villain.” The preoccupations of the story is about moral responsibility. I didn’t want the ground to be completely solid. One of the things you wonder as the Navy Seals must have wondered as they came into the compound in Abbottabad not knowing if the person there was Bin Laden. You do find yourself thinking even once he’s in captivity, “Have they got the right guy?” He is clever enough to exploit the weaknesses in the scenario to his own advantage. A Nazi doctor is about the apotheosis of villainy in a certain kind of cinematic literature and that’s a trap, a danger of two-dimensionality, and Peter Straughan and I were very conscious of not wanting this character to cooperate with the script, not wanting him to be this monstrous presence. He does say things that are monstrous, but even that you have to contextualize that he’s a man fighting for his life and looking for any advantage. He can be quite charming when he says he would prefer to be fed by Rachel, who had, he says, the makings of a nurse in another life. There’s something beguiling in that sort of wisdom and you find yourself agreeing with him when he says that.

We were under a lot of pressure to change the title at one point. It’s somewhat of a negative signifier in this modern age though I always thought it was a marvelous title. In the interest of collaboration, I said, “Well, if we can come up with another one,” and one we thought of was “Another Life.” He is a man who makes another life for himself, or tries to. Watch for the moment when he starts speaking in English. And there’s Rachel, looking out behind sunglasses which are supposed to protect her eyes from the sun but she’s looking out at a life she should never have had, that is a false life, that seemed a provocative and interesting idea.

It is very Israeli to have such an international cast. Israel is even more of a melting pot than the US.

I’m slightly conscious of the fact that other than the Israeli actors, the principals are not by in large Jewish. That wasn’t by intent. But the internationality of the cast gave me a kind of latitude. I don’t think anyone watching the film would know where Jessica Chastain or Marton Csokas was from. He’s actually half Hungarian. And Jesper is a Dane who blessedly is completely fluent in German and English.

Did you have the actors who played the younger versions of the characters work with the actors who played their older selves?

Only Helen and Jessica. That symbiosis is necessary for the story and I set higher standards of physical affinity. I wanted Jessica to be an unknown but she’s less of an unknown now! I looked at the photos of the men side by side. But David is almost unrecognizable to himself, one of those situations where you might say, “I saw him the other day and you wouldn’t recognize him.” So resemblance was less important.

It is a story about stories, isn’t it?

There’s a lot of thematic richness in the film. It’s about a need for heroes and the way we mythologized them. This country’s whole political discourse and movie culture is based on the idea of the hero. It’s a very potent idea to deconstruct. And we all mythologize our own histories with an unconscious editing of our own behavior. You know you’ve got a good story when it starts talking back to you and revealing things that you haven’t foreseen. It’s the daughter’s unawareness, the way she is enveloped in a lie — the mother has to do something truly heroic, to immolate herself in order to release her daughter from the contamination of the lie.

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Directors Interview

Interview: Yael Hersonski of ‘A Film Unfinished’

Posted on August 19, 2010 at 8:00 am

For decades, our impressions of the Holocaust have been formed by the images that survive and by the memories of those who were there. Now, as we near a time when the experience will no longer be within the memory of anyone alive, we rely even more on the documentation that is available. Although we recognize its limits, we recognize that it is a starting point.
“A Film Unfinished” combines some of the most well-known, intensely studied, and now-iconic images of the Warsaw Ghetto with some newly-discovered outtake footage that adds context and a great deal of new information about what we thought we knew and understood. Until now, what we have seen was the story the Nazis wanted to tell about the community where Jews were sent to live before they were sent to concentration camps. With the new footage, we are better able to understand what was really going on. The film opened yesterday in New York and it opens tomorrow in LA and on Sept. 24 in Washington, D.C.
In the New York Times, Jeanette Catsoulis called “A Film Unfinished“:

remarkable as much for its speculative restraint as for its philosophical reach. Moving methodically reel by reel and acknowledging the “many layers of reality,” the director creates a palimpsest of impressions from multiple, meticulously researched sources representing both victims and oppressors.

I interviewed Israeli director Yael Hersonski about making the movie as she was preparing to introduce the film and lead a discussion at the Washington DC Jewish Community Center.
It is fascinating that you took footage made by the Nazis to tell a lie and combined it with outtakes to make it tell a story that is truer to the actual experience.
I don’t think I am showing the truth — it is too big of a notion. I just show what happens when we don’t decontexualize these images as if it is objective documentations of history. That is the way I was educated to see it, as though it was made by history itself. When I saw this footage, visually, I felt the cameraman standing behind the camera with his own idea of limited reality, his own choices. He was serving the purposes of his commanders. The cameraman claims he did not completely understand the purposes of what he was doing. He refers to “the rich ones” without acknowledging that it was staged.
Maybe the greatest discovery of the research of this film was finding the protocols of the cameraman who took these images. You can hear him describe what he remembers he was shooting as you see the images. When I read the protocols for the first time, I was overwhelmed. I realized that everything I thought I understood was distorted by the way it was used. It’s a general visual background for so many different stories.
Something like 95% of the imagery of the Holocaust was shot by the perpetrators for their own purposes. The Nazis were the only ones who could document during the war. We have the documentation of the liberation of the camps by Americans and others but while the war was going on the only ones to take pictures were the Nazis themselves. When we say “to remember, not to forget” in Holocaust education, our memories are formed by these distorted portrayals of what was going on. So we have to understand that this footage was shot from a very specific point of view, to separate the point of view from the image, the cinematic manipulation from what suggests itself as reality.
How were the outtakes discovered?
The old footage was found in 1954. Then in 1998, two researchers, one American, Cooper C. Graham, and one English, Edwin Wood, were looking for footage from the 1936 Olympic games. They were looking in a film vault in an Air Force base in Ohio, of all places. They saw two film cans with “Das Ghetto” written on them. They knew the old footage of course so they immediately recognized what this was. They got in touch with the Library of Congress, which got in touch with the Holocaust Museum. This included nine minutes in color, which is very rare, very powerful. I realized that my reference for the Holocaust in color is Hollywood films, not reality. It looked like a Steven Spielberg movie, not the real thing. Our vision is so defined by the black and white images we all know that it does not seem right somehow to see it in color. That, too, should make us question the way our understanding is influenced and defined by the limited documentation we have available.
It is haunting to see in the footage recently discovered the cameramen themselves, emphasizing the artificiality of the situation. And then you add to that, giving us his comments.
Suddenly he has a face, he’s looking at us for a second. It’s not this far away black and white, almost symbolic image; he’s here. I wanted to prove to myself the specificity and artificiality of these images.
What was the Nazi passion for documentation? What were they hoping to achieve?
Germany was the most advanced nation in Europe for photography and cinematography. They were obsessed about it. The soldiers traveled to their front lines with their own private cameras. The documentation was massive. Ninety percent were destroyed during the last days of the war. We can only speculate on what they were trying to achieve. We do have one clue. The Nazi minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, wrote in his diary four days before this filming began that he told Himmler, now when they start to move the Jews to the east, for “the final solution” process, it is urgent to make as many films as possible to educate the next generation. They wanted to establish the museum of the future in Prague. It would have been a memorial site for the Jewish race according to their own narrative. This would be “the last snapshot” of daily Jewish life, with the upper classes corrupted, indifferent, immoral, and the cause of poverty and diseases.
They took their own atrocities and shot it as if it was caused by the Jews. The most powerful propaganda is not entirely lies; they know how to combine what is true with what they want the story to be.
How did you find the survivors who were there during this filming?
Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial museum in Israel, has lists of survivors. Many have already died. We found four women who were still alive. This was the most urgent part of the film-making so it was the first thing we did. I invited each one of them alone to screen the footage to make it as intense as could be so maybe they would remember things even they did not know they knew. It was one of the most emotional and exhausting part of making the film. And of course it was hard for them. But these women felt it was urgent for them to interpret this silent footage as those who were there, who were hiding from the film crew, to have the last word, the final word over these images.
It’s the most truthful way to remember something that has meaning. We cannot understand numbers like six million. We can understand someone looking at us or talking to us and saying, “I was here.”

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Directors Documentary Interview

Protest of MPAA Rating for New Holocaust Film

Posted on August 2, 2010 at 4:10 pm

“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.”