The Jerusalem Film Festival’s founder, Lia van Leer, always made sure that there was a strong selection of films of Jewish interest in every festival, and the 38th Jerusalem Film Festival, which is running at the Jerusalem Cinematheque until September 4, is no exception.
Several films focus on little-known aspects of the Holocaust. Vanessa Lapa’s compelling Speer Goes to Hollywood is a look at one of the strangest chapters in the history of Nazism: the attempt of Hitler’s chief architect, Albert Speer, to turn his life into a major motion picture. Speer spun his tale expertly, penning a number of memoirs that became unlikely bestsellers, such as Inside the Third Reich. He was remarkably successful at painting himself as the patrician intellectual who was a cultured voice of reason inside the Nazi headquarters. Even the judges at the Nuremberg trials were swayed and he was the highest ranking Nazi to be spared the death penalty.
When he was released from Spandau Prison, he tried his hand at turning his life into a screenplay, working with a professional screenwriter, Andrew Birkin, to try to tell his story. Lapa uses recordings of the conversations between Speer and the screenwriter to illustrate the retired Nazi’s strange conviction that no one would really be bothered that he had been a central part of the killing machine that took the lives of six million Jews. Birkin’s attempts to get Speer to discuss the death camps and his abuse of the 12 million slave laborers who were under his command becomes increasingly surreal. It is the story of an attempt to manipulate the media and popular culture and it is particularly compelling in this age of fake news and “alternative facts.”
And speaking of the number six million, David Fisher looks into that number in his documentary, The Round Number. Fisher, the son of Holocaust survivors, grew up in the shadow of their trauma and grief, and feels that it is important to figure out how that number was arrived at and whether it is accurate. He of course acknowledges that millions of Jews lost their lives, but wonders how the six million figure became accepted so soon after the Holocaust.
Fisher makes a convincing case as to why it is important to look into this question. Whether you feel it is critical to know exactly how many Jews were killed or feel that the number, which has become iconic, should be left alone, you will find this film fascinating. Fisher speaks to many historians, among them such famous figures as Prof. Yehuda Bauer, and looks deeply into the history of how the death toll was calculated. While it is generally accepted as fact that the Nazis kept detailed and accurate records of their victims, several of these academics explain why this was not necessarily the case, particularly when mass deportations were carried out. It is also understandable why it was important to have a number at the ready when discussing the Holocaust immediately following the war.
He addresses the question of how you define when the Holocaust began – which he and his interviewees explain is not as clear as you might think – and exactly when it ended. Should suicide victims who killed themselves in the ghettos be counted as Holocaust victims, Fisher asks. In addition, evidence of several massacres of Jews by Nazis during the war have come to light in recent years. But the six-million figure has not been altered and the death toll may be higher than previously thought, several historians suggest in this thought-provoking film.
WHILE THE Nazis did photograph some of their own atrocities, Christophe Cognet’s From Where They Stood is a documentary that focuses on the photographs that prisoners in Nazi concentration camps and in the Birkenau death camp were somehow able to take and smuggle out. He looks at how the pictures were shot secretly, who took them and how they might have gotten the cameras, and explains what the inmates’ photographs reveal in the larger context of Holocaust history.
In a review of From Where They Stood when it premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival earlier this year, David D’Arcy wrote in The Art Newspaper: “Since the Germans destroyed many of the camps as Allied troops approached, part of Cognet’s project became an archaeology of vanished sites that are now highly groomed monuments. Like crime scene reconstructions, each of these landscapes frames a micro-history of horror... The photographs are objects that sustain the memory of the victims, in spite of Nazi efforts to erase all signs of the Holocaust.”
Other films on Holocaust themes at the festival include Sergei Loznitsa’s Babi Yar. Context, which reconstructs the historical context of this massacre through archival footage documenting the German occupation of Ukraine and the decade following the event, and Marta Popivoda’s Landscapes of Resistance, which tells the story of, Sonia, a young Yugoslav partisan, who was one of the leaders of the resistance movement in Auschwitz.
KOSHER REHAB by Anna Oliker is a moving look at AZ House, a treatment facility in Jerusalem that caters to American drug addicts from Orthodox families. While outsiders may have the idea that the religious community is an enclave protected from all that ails the modern world, this film shows that is not the case, and that this community has been hit hard by the opioid epidemic. AZ House offers those addicts who choose to try to recover a setting where they can get help and maintain a religious lifestyle. It is free and does not accept funding from sources other than donations, according to the film, which leaves its staff struggling to pay the bills each month, because some of its methods are a bit, well, unorthodox, and they do not want to be obligated to any outside entity such as an insurance company or the government.
Its executive director, Eric Levitz, is himself a former drug addict who is passionate about helping others. AZ House is based on the traditional 12-step model and its participants recite the AA serenity prayer as well as Jewish prayers, but it differs from many programs in several ways, most critically in the fact that Levitz believes in getting addicts into treatment the moment they express a wish to get clean. “You have a window [when an addict decides to seek treatment] and then it slams shut,” he says. There are interesting scenes that show what it takes to run a program like this, such as when Levitz looks through the belongings of a new arrival and shows the ways that it is possible to hide drugs, like taking apart tefillin and sticking a fentanyl patch inside. Kosher Rehab tells a complicated, human story never seen before.
ANNA SOMERSHAF’S rousing and engrossing Women of Valor looks at the struggle of Esty Shushan and other women from the ultra-Orthodox community fighting the leaders of the haredi parties to allow women to run for and hold political office. Shushan founded a NGO called Nivcharot, ultra-Orthodox Women for Voice and Equality, which trains women to fight the political and religious system. She and her comrades-in-arms are formidable crusaders and it seems that their lives have prepared them for this fight. After all, if you have raised a large family and supported them by yourself, you are ready to take on the world.
While some secular viewers may find themselves getting impatient over the fact that Shushan does not just start her own party or vote for a different party that supports women’s rights, she makes a compelling case for why she wants to work for change within the religious world. And the movie shows the risks that they are taking. They are threatened and there is the very real danger that their children could be kicked out of schools and that other retribution could be taken against their families. The film contains interesting scenes of Shushan and others at a women’s rights conference at the UN, where she works alongside, and in collaboration with Arab women who see a common thread in their struggles.
Most of these documentaries will be on television eventually, but the festival is your chance to watch them on the big screen, sometimes in the presence of the directors and others connected to the films.
For the full program and to tickets, go to https://jff.org.il/en.