I could relate to this trailer. I desparately wanted straight hair when I was a kid because it was shiny. Can’t wait to see this movie.
16
May
Swimming in Auschwitz at the Museum of Jewish Heritage
my flickr: Swimming in Auschwitz Set
Went with Jason to see the NYC / East Coast Premiere of Swimming in Auschwitz at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in Lower Manhattan.
It is a documentary about six vibrant, amazing women who survived the infamous Nazi death camp of Auschwitz.
Director Jon Kean was in attendance along with Renee Firestone one of the women featured in the film. [Photo above.]
It was really magnificent, I highly recommend it. Editor Anne Stein did a fantastic job seamlessly blending stock footage and the stories of these women so that their narratives kept a collective, cooperative flow.
Director Jon Kean prefaced the screening by stating his view of the difference between how men and women tell stories. A man will tell you the facts of what happened. Women will recall the quirky details.
After the screening the pair came on stage and answered audience questions – my notes below.
Renee Firestone describes the first time she ever spoke about her experience. (She is an educator for the Simon Wiesenthal Center.) It was at a Mormon Temple and they screened the very graphic French documentary Night and Fog (1955) [I remember seeing it in high school.]. She was hoping people would leave. She was surprised that nobody moved and was told by Rabbi Cooper that she must speak. She started to talk and has no idea where the strength came from.
In response to a question about seeking retribution she states that there was very little retribution. They just wanted to live lives. And, telling stories is revenge.
An Israeli woman asks how she feels about 70,000 Jews marching to Washington to protest Darfur but not protesting Ahmadinejad, President of Iran, who has called for Israel’s destruction. The woman, it seemed, equated this to ignoring Hitler.
Renee Firestone responds that she has been involved in protesting every single genocide. We have lived in the bloodiest century. When she sees footage (of Darfur), she sees herself in Auschwitz and asks her interlocuter what she has done?
[Jewish organizations have protested Ahmadinejad. Others have kept busy with other issues, feeling that to protest him on a grand scale would be giving him power and more of a platform on the World stage or that it might be viewed as inflating the risk for political purpose.]
When asked about the reaction of German audiences to the film Renee Firestone describes her involvement with One By One an organization that facilitates dialogue between descendants of victims, perpetrators, bystanders and resisters. She spent a week together with a Nazi in Berlin. She was glad she went. She learned how easy it is to be indoctrinated, brainwashed or just give in to peer pressure. She does not know what she would have done and relates that one can never know unless placed in a situation. Similarly, one doesn’t know how much strength they have until it is called upon.
Director Jon Kean recommends seeing The Last Days, another documentary that Renee Firestone is featured in. During filming, they found documentation related to a doctor who experimented on her sister and she finds and confronts him at the end of the film.
A young woman who is reading Elie Wiesel’s Night asks if she ever has flashbacks to her experiences. Renee Firestone replies, all the time, plus she speaks about her experiencees every day. Sometimes a flash of an experience will hit her out of nowhere. Director Jon Kean adds that when Survivors agree to be interviewed they relate that the next 2 or 3 nights after an interview will be especially difficult.
He is asked how he came to the project and responds that he began the project to study laughter as a survival tool. Men would say sometimes there was humor, and they would laugh, but could not pin down specific details for him. He became enamored of how these women told stories.
She is asked her opinion of God’s role and about faith. She responds that she has so much faith she doesn’t believe God had anything to do with the atrocities. She relates the story of Noah and the Flood and the promise given by God that he will never destroy the world again…she quips that it’s a shame he did not extract the same promise from Noah / Man.
She responds to a question about survival saying it was pure luck. Director Jon Kean adds three elements that helped people to survive according to Michael Berenbaum based on previous events they had done together. [Berenbaum was supposed to be moderator for the evening but couldn't make it due to bad weather.] Assessing Risk, Finding Meaning, Having people to support you are three elements that repeat in tales of survival. They’re not bad things to have in general.
One man in the audience whose father was a survivor originally from Muncacz [Hungary] asked about the responses of former neighbors after the War. His father’s experience were incredulous responses of “You’re still alive?!” “Can’t Believe they didn’t get you!”…Her husband is originally from Muncacz and there is footage in the film of people dancing from Muncacz…Renee Firestone relates meeting her next door neighbor after the war who was about 10 at the time and wondering what his family said about her family being taken away. He said they were sorry her sister died. But, she relates bitterly that nobody asked at the time. Nobody cared. This is one of the only points in the evening that this amazing woman gives in to negativity. Director Jon Kean adds that some may have been sorry their neighbors were gone but it did improve their lives economically.
A woman in the audience asks about the cruelty of female Nazis which is not depicted in this film about women. Renee Firestone agrees that the capacity of women for cruelty was worse and recalls a guard from Auschwitz C Lager who was hung after the war. I believe the reference was to Irma Grese who was hung at the Belsen trial.
To conclude the evening the question of retribution is raised again and how she felt when one of the other women in the film relates that at liberation she was given the chance to kill one of her persecuters but does not take it…Renee Firestone replies we are not killers though she wouldn’t be sorry if someone else killed them. This last bit said with the smile of someone who has survived, amazingly, with her sense of humor intact.
I overheard a woman in the bathroom complain that the film made light and didn’t show what really happened, children being torn from their parent’s arms. She may have been a Holocaust survivor and I would not try to dispute her response to the film. My take on it was quite different. It was a unique perspective on the horrors that occurred. I hope I would never have to confront such horrors and if I did I hope I would be able to keep my humanity intact via my sense of the absurd. Also, there actually is some very graphic documentary footage in the film. You are not hit over the head with the brutality that occurred but the footage is there and it is a subcurrent running throughout the film which should be viewed in advance before showing it to young people.
Upcoming screenings are taking place in London, England and Salt Lake City, Utah. You can check the official website for additional screenings or just buy the DVD (there’s a link for purchase on the site) for $20 via Paypal.
I am torn about writing a summary of the film as opposed to the evening because I think it should be viewed so for now am not going to do so.
Article on the film here.
25
Apr
Just Married at Makor
Just Married
Just Married by director Ayelet Bechar was really good. It documents the difficulties of two couples Israeli Arabs who marry Palestinians from Gaza or the West Bank. As of 2002 there is a law prohibiting family reunification.
Suhad and Rabia are a young couple that met at university. To be together Suhad becomes an illegal resident in Jerusalem. The film depicts her change from vibrancy to depression as she stays in her home most of the time so she is not caught. In a depressing bit of circular beaurocracy, her husband Rabia (the one with legal status in Israel) requests a permit for her and is told he must file for Family Reunification but that no requests are being taken at this time and she cannot be given any other sort of document because she needs the one of family reuinification.
For the older couple on the film Kifach and Yazeed, the solution is to stay in Berlin until the law changes and they can go home. Kifach struggles to learn German and at the same time, she must be in Israel for part of the year so she does not lost her status as is threatened in one municipal office. She had been very active in the struggle for coexistence in Israel and has many photos with major Israeli political figures such as Shulamit Aloni and Ehud Barak. Her husband views Barak as slime and does not want to see the photo, there is elegant symmetry in the film as Kifach later confronts Barak at a conference in Berlin about this law keeping families apart.
There is also a beautiful symmetry as the film ends with both families giving birth to children.
It is a complex issue. The situations these people are in are terrible. They are being kept from having a family with the person they love in their homes. The Israeli government believes that this horrible law may be saving someone’s life; it feels it must ignore the fact that it is also adding much misery to many innocent civilians.
The law was ammended so that women above the age of 25 and men above the age of 35 may now apply for family reunification. The director was at the screening and gave the update that Suhad was about to have her birthday and would more than likely obtain family reuinification and that Kifach’s struggle continues as well.
It makes me feel lucky that all I have to deal with is a bunch of paperwork and a $1000 fee for a fiancee visa to the UK. Our revolution was a really long time ago. (Though, it does suck that the price doubled as of April 1st of this year.)
There is a great summary of the Israeli law involved from a recent Jerusalem Post article (Background: Terror plot may have blown family reunification By DAN IZENBERG, April 11, 2007) :
“Prohibitions on family reunification were first introduced by the Interior Ministry on April 1, 2002, following the suicide bombing at the Matza restaurant in Haifa’s Neveh Sha’anan neighborhood in which 15 Israelis were killed. The driver of the car bomb was a Hamas terrorist who had married an Israeli and carried a blue identity card.
Initially, the freeze on family reunification was total. No Palestinian who married an Israeli could begin the five-year process for obtaining residential rights or citizenship, and those who were in the middle of the process could not advance.
On July 31, 2003, the Knesset turned the administrative decision into a one-year law, which was periodically extended.
On July 27, 2005, the law was amended so that Palestinian women above the age of 25 and men above 35 could live with their Israeli spouses if they met security criteria. Younger Palestinians were still barred from living in Israel.
On March 21, 2007, the law was amended again and extended until July 2008. The current law provides a humanitarian committee to consider exceptional requests for family reunification from women under 25 and men under 35, but toughens the security criteria and extends the restrictions to spouses from countries classified as enemy.
The law in all its forms has been harshly criticized by human rights groups in Israel and abroad. In May, the High Court narrowly rejected a petition to overrule it in its second version. The Association for Civil Rights in Israel, Meretz MK Zehava Gal-On and the Israeli-Arab rights group Adalah have already declared they will petition against the newly amended law.
The human rights groups claim the law violates the fundamental right of every citizen to a family and is motivated by Jewish demographic concerns. The law prevents roughly 20,000 Palestinians from living in Israel with their Israeli spouses and also prevents them from raising families in Israel.
The government insists the temporary law is based on security considerations. Granting Palestinians Israeli identity cards and the right to unrestricted freedom of movement throughout Israel is dangerous, officials say.”
UPDATE: 29 Oct. 07: Israel to approve some 3,400 requests for family unification in one-time action
25
Nov
Democracy on Deadline
Ages ago I did some freelance translation work for a documentary – it was rebroadcast on PBS today. Democracy on Deadline tells the stories of reporters in danger zones. I did translation from Hebrew to English for the Israel/Palestine part of the film. They cover the Haaretz newspaper during a time I was working for the English-language edition entertainment guide.
PBS site here
Reviews here and here.
ITVS page with discussion guide
Film Credits
DVD for Sale
DVD for Sale
07
Nov
The Beautiful South, The Darien Dilemma, Hebrew lesson and a damn fine apple tart at Bistro 60
Last night was amazing!! Went to a free acoustic set by The Beautiful South. It was at a tiny venue on the Lower East Side called Cake Shop. Their website’s calendar is coy. I got the headsup from Oh My Rockness – a great list for keeping up with alterna-indie shows in NYC. They played new songs from their new CD Superbi which is really good and the played classics like Old Red Eyes Is Back, Prettiest Eyes, Perfect 10, Rotterdam and Don’t Marry Her. Paul Heaton even did a little poetry reading.
The Darien Dilemma
Then I went to see a great documentary, The Darien Dilemma, at Makor as part of their Reel Jews festival. A father and his filmmaker son explore the previously untold story of 1,000 Viennese Jews stranded on the frozen Danube River in 1941 as they awaited their would-be rescuer, Ruth Klieger, an agent of the newly created Mossad.
Erez Laufer weaves together interviews with the survivors, archival film, dramatic re-enactments (including scenes of the actors’ preparation – it seems like they stand in for the audience while they get inside the characters’ heads.) and footage of his father the screenwriter.
The director Erez Laufer was at the screening. He notes that the footage of a ship in the film is actually from a ship that set sail a few months prior to the Darien that was shot by a Hungarian sailor, but photos (of youth groups and a massacre) are original and directly linked to the story. Both in the film and in person he explains that his father started looking at archives to find out more about his own history and how his mother escaped Europe with him as a small child.
His father then became intrigued by this story of Ruth Klieger and partially with her reported beauty and alleged affair with David Ben-Gurion. She remained in Israel, worked as a PR person for shipping company ZIM and died in Tel Aviv in 1979.
The film is about her, and not less so about the filmmaker’s father. Through this film many survivors who were interviewed learned a fuller story of what happened when they were brought to Palestine.
It is worth seeing – it is made in an interesting way and tells a compelling and little-known story. Note to documentary filmmakers: Include your notes, interviews, arguments with your father the screenwriter…realize how much central characters may not know about what happened to them….You can buy tickets for December screenings on Makor’s website.
After the film I met Jocelyn and Lee at Bistro 60 for dessert. We had Tarte Tatin – Apple tart with crème fraîche. This is an amazing dessert. We devoured it – moaning all the way. Learned that Hebrew for “to moan” is גניחה – Geniha. Lee was shocked we didn’t know this word. Jocelyn’s response – I’m more of a screamer.
my flickr: The Beautiful South at Cake Shop
