Regarding Ms. Frishman's query re Tisha Be-Av films, let me suggest:
"Space Shuttle Columbia: Mission of Hope" (60 min.) that focuses on Israeli Air Force pilot and astronaut Ilan Ramon, who took two Holocaust artifacts along on the ill-fated mission. One was a sketch by a Theresienstadt ghetto child who imagined what Earth would look like to someone standing on the Moon. The other was a very small Sefer Torah that was used for an orphan's Bar-Mitsva in Bergen-Belsen in early 1945.
"Ahead of Time: The Extraordinary Journey of Ruth Gruber" (73 min.) is about the renowned journalist and author born in Brooklyn in 1911 and about to celebrate her 105th birthday in September 2016. She was the youngest recipient of a Ph.D. She reported on Inuit/Eskimo life in Alaska, was the first Western journalist allowed into Soviet Siberia, was one of the earliest to report on the threat of Hitler's rise in Germany. In August 1944, she undertook a mission to the Adriatic Sea to rescue 973 Holocaust survivors who were brought to Fort Ontario near Oswego, NY. In 1947, she reported on the capture by the British of the Aliya Bet ship "Exodus 1947" and accompanied the more than 4,000 Jewish survivors who were deported back to Germany. Her photo-journalism played an important role in the run-up to the birth of the Jewish State. Her reporting extended to Soviet Jewry and Ethiopian Jewry and their rescue.
"Shanghai Ghetto" (95 min.) is about the ghetto established by the Japanese in occupied Shanghai to house about 20,000 European Jews who sought refuge there. The story is told through interviews with adults describing childhood and teen years in Germany and then in Shanghai. Scholarly commentary is provided by historian David Kranzler. The interviewees are followed on a return to the ghetto site in today's China. It is a fascinating story, moving and uplifting. Some viewers may be puzzled to note that there is no mention of the Mir Yeshiva group. The focus of the film is on the more typical German Jews' experience.
"Hiding and Seeking: Faith and Tolerance After the Holocaust" (85 min.) is about the experience of Menachem Daum, an Orthodox educational psychologist and filmmaker, who took his Hareidi sons on a journey to Poland to meet the Polish Christian family who hid the Daum family. The film is partly a meditation on hakarat ha-tov, gratitude, and on dangers of narrow-mindedness.
"Weapons of the Spirit" (90 min.) about the Protestant residents of the village of Le Chambon sur Lignon in France who saved 5,000 Jews despite the collaborationist Vichy government and German agents. The producer of the film, Pierre Sauvage, was born in 1942 to his refugee parents hiding in Le Chambon. This is a wondrous true story of good people who chose to protect strangers in need. The question of why these French villagers and farmers acted. It is a wonderful, tragic, and hopeful film.
"Sugihara: Conspiracy of Kindness" (82 min.) tells the story of the heroic Japanese diplomat in Kovno, Lithuania, who issued thousands of Japanese transit visas to Jews fleeing Nazi German tyranny. Among those saved were the students and teachers of the Mir Yeshiva. Thousands of recipients of the Japanese transit visas managed to reach Shanghai where they survived the war.
"Resistance: Untold Stories of Jewish Partisans" (60 min.)
"Kinderblock 66: Return to Buchenwald" (87 min.) follows several child survivors of Buchenwald, part of over 800 Jewish children who were kept alive at Buchenwald concentration camp by the clandestine prisoner leaders. Among the children who were kept alive was the future Rabbi Israel Meir Lau and the recently deceased author Elie Wiesel. The film introduces several survivors preparing to return to Buchenwald for a reunion in April 2010.
"Imaginary Witness: Hollywood and the Holocaust" (92 min.) looks at the failure of Hollywood during the 1930s and early '40s to reflect the oppression of Jews by Nazi Germany and its allies. The film describes how anti-Semitism and the Holocaust were rarely portrayed for decades after the German defeat, until the 1970s and beyond.
"A Film Unfinished" (91 min.) is a harrowing film that presents the footage shot by Nazi German crews in the Warsaw Ghetto. The Nazi film project was tendentious, to produce a propaganda film that portrayed Jews as despicable, criminal, unfeeling, greedy, etc. Some of the footage was discovered in archives after the war, including some color film. To comment on the Nazi footage, several survivors of the ghetto were located in Israel. During the screening, the survivors' reactions are shown by the flickering light from the screen. It is a very important and very powerful film. There is some nudity in the film in staged scenes with men and women in a mikve that was specially reopened. The sequence of several women entering the mikve is very difficult to view. One woman in particular is clearly very frightened, very angry, and trying to contain herself from exploding emotionally. This film is clearly not for all audiences.
Supposedly, a picture is worth a thousand words. That can also be understood to mean that a picture or a film must be interpreted and explained because most people lack historical background or familiarity with film techniques and technology. Increasingly, documentarians are solving the problem of lack of archival photos or film footage by staging scenes with actors in costume. Many viewers are not sufficiently sophisticated to recognize what is faked and what is real archival imagery. That is a threat that will increase with the passage of time.
With best wishes,
Robert
Prof. Robert Moses Shapiro
Judaic Studies Department
Brooklyn College of the City University of New York
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/03/2016 06:43PM by mlb.
