Directed by Louise Archambault, Irena’s Vow tells the amazing true story of Irena Gut Opdyke (Sophie Nelisse), a strong-willed, 19-year-old Polish woman who is employed by the Nazis during WWII. Promoted to housekeeper in the home of a highly respected Nazi officer, Irena is advised by the other staff to remain ‘seen and not heard’…
“This will be a tour about pain…, also a tour that celebrates the people.” It’s hard to categorize A Real Pain, written and directed by Jesse Eisenberg. Its foundation is an odd couple road movie but, for all the humor that grows out of that, I can’t quite call it a comedy. It is a…
The title card that opens Rodrigo Cortés’s Love Gets a Room, gives us the setting of the story (Warsaw in January 1942) and the context of the Warsaw ghetto filled with 400,000 Jews with suffering and inevitable death everywhere. The title card ends with the statement, “Or they try to remember they are still alive.”…
Sometimes, the most difficult part of the war is when it’s over. Set at the conclusion of WWII in 1945, Plan A introduces us to Max (August Diehl), a man who dreams nightly of his murdered wife and daughter. Shattered by their loss, Max meets a group of Holocaust survivors who have a plan for revenge. By…
Doctors take an oath to save lives. Sometimes that means making some hard decisions. For a group of doctors at a Catholic hospital in Rome in 1943, those decisions were very hard. It could have cost them their lives. Instead they infected a number of local Jews with a disease. That may sound inhumane, but…
?You have to survive. It will be our revenge.? Steven Oritt?s premiere feature film, My Name Is Sara, is based on a true story from the Holocaust. It is like many other such stories, but it is also different from those stories as well. It is a bit of a reminder that all stories have…
It is hard enough for star-crossed lovers to find a path to happiness, but when you stick the Holocaust in the middle of it all, it seems impossible. I?ll Find You, directed by Martha Coolidge, takes us into a world where young lovers have their lives torn apart and must find a way back together….
In some ways Betrayed, from director Erik Svensson is like many other films about the Holocaust. It tells the story of the deportation of Jews from Norway in 1942. (Actually, we start three years earlier, in more normal times.) But this film doesn?t quite follow the pattern of other Holocaust films, which gives it a…
Hitler. A name that for much of the world connotes absolute evil. But that name is burnt into history in such a way that we continue to struggle with the legacy that left millions dead. Petra Epperline and Michael Tucker bring us The Meaning of Hitler, a film framed by the 1987 book by Sebastian…
?We?re all animals fighting for scraps on the Serengeti.? One of the most celebrated trials of the twentieth century was when Israel put Adolph Eichmann on trial. Eichmann headed the SS Office for Jewish Affairs and was one of the key architects of the Holocaust. But before they could put him on trial, they had…
