Click here to listen to the interview. When I spoke with Paula Apsell via Zoom on April 10, 2024, I couldn’t help but start by thanking her for making a film that portrayed Jews in the Holocaust as something other than passive victims. That narrative is all too familiar, and for too many years, was… Read More »
SIMCHAS AND SORROWS — Genevieve Adams Interview
Click here to listen to the interview. I loved the first scenes of Genevieve Adams’ SIMCHAS AND SORROWS so much that I worried what followed would have a hard time living up to it. In it, the heroine, Agnes, during her Catholic schoolgirl days, questions a nun about Jesus’ own religious upbringing, and how best… Read More »
DARA OF JASENOVAC
DARA OF JASENOVAC is a brutal film about a lesser-known part of the Holocaust. Based on the testimony of survivors, it expounds on Jasenovac, the only Fascist concentration camps in World War II that were not run by the Nazis themselves. Instead, inspired and advised by the Nazis, they were established by the Roman Catholic… Read More »
ASK DR. RUTH — Ryan White Interview
Click here to listen to the interview. One of the first things we see in ASK DR. RUTH is the subject of that documentary, the legendary Dr. Ruth Westheimer breaking the fourth wall to tell director, Ryan White, to call his mother. And while she is serious, she also has a twinkle in her eye. … Read More »
DENIAL
DENIAL is a lean, literate, and emotionally devastating film. It’s based on the true story of Emory history professor Deborah E. Lipstadt’s (Rachel Weisz) legal battle in the British courts to prove that the Holocaust had actually taken place and was not, as asserted by Holocaust deniers, a construct invented by world Jewry as part… Read More »
SON OF SAUL
The first image in SON OF SAUL is a green landscape that is out of focus. There is the sound of someone in distress, and the image of a man walking towards the camera until his impassive face fills the screen and comes into focus. Much else comes into focus in the course of this… Read More »
Géza Röhrig and László Nemes on SON OF SAUL
When I spoke with actor Géza Röhrig and director/co-writer László Nemes on December 12, 2015, I knew it was going to be a serious conversation. I also knew that it was going to be as insightful as their film, SON OF SAUL. We started the interview with my asking why these two would want to immerse themselves… Read More »
BLIND SPOT: HITLER’S SECRETARY
BLIND SPOT is an oral history released as a feature documentary. Ordinarily, this would be a bad idea, oral histories being low-tech and single camera, but the subject is Traudl Junge and her history is of her years as Hitlers secretary. Filmmakers Andre Heller and Othmar Schmiderer must have known they were on to something… Read More »
Adrien Brody is THE PIANIST, Thomas Kretschmann, his Tormentor
Meeting Adrien Brody and Thomas Kretschmann is like spending time with two old pals who still enjoy joking around with each other even after a difficult shoot in Europe and a grinding publicity tour schedule to promote their extraordinary film, THE PIANIST. Once we began talking about that film, though, they were deadly serious about the subject matter, the… Read More »