Unraveling History

The Essential Link, directed by Yonatan Nir, is a fascinating documentary that combines personal family details with elements of an historical thriller.  

On Kibbutz Hazorea in the Jezreel Valley, there is a building called the Wilfred House.  It is a cultural center for the kibbutz and filmmaker Yonatan Nir’s grandfather displayed his paintings there.  But Nir doesn’t know for whom it is named and he is determined to find out.  His research unravels a story that includes Nazi cruelty, a stunning collection of art from the Far East, survivors’ guilt and an overwhelming tale of tremendous personal sacrifice.

The complete title of the film is The Essential Link – The Story of Wilfred Israel and we slowly learn to appreciate the activities of Wilfred Israel who used his personal connections and most of his wealth to help save literally thousands of German Jews.

Wilfred Israel was a wealthy businessman, owner of a department store in the center of Berlin, which was built by his ancestors during the 19^th century.  He was a lover of literature and art and in the 1920s, he traveled to the Far East where he began his art collection.  He had a personal relationship with Einstein, Chaim Weizmann, Christopher Isherwood, Martin Buber and Lord Herbert Samuel, to name a few!  During a short detention in a Nazi prison, he befriended members of a Jewish youth group, who he later helped to emigrate to Palestine.  These were the founders of Kibbutz Hazorea.  Today, his art collection is housed in the Wilfred House on Kibbutz Hazorea!

Wilfred Israel worked unceasingly to help obtain the necessary documents for Jews to leave Germany, expended his personal wealth to the rescue of these Jews, with the help of the MI6 agent at the British Embassy in Berlin, obtained visas for Jews, and was the key figure in initiating the Kindertransport operation that saved perhaps as many as 10,000 German Jewish children by sending them to England.

After visiting his pioneering friends in Palestine, he traveled around Europe, desperately trying to free Jews from the clutches of Nazism.  He lost his life when, traveling from Lisbon to London, a German missile shot down his plane.

The Essential Link tells an important and rather unknown story of the Holocaust and, at the same time, it talks about the importance of memory for future generations.  

The film is available (beginning March 2017) from Ruth Films in two versions: 78 minutes or 52 minutes.  I previewed the longer version and was spellbound. If you enjoyed other films that unravel historical mysteries such as The Flat by Arnon Goldfinger and The Green Dumpster Mystery by Tal Haim Yoffe, then you will enjoy this film also!

Documentary filmmaking -- truth or fantasy?

Tonight, I went to the premiere screening of the documentary film Café Nagler, directed by Mor Kaplansky.  I enjoyed myself so much as I watched a tremendously surprising and humorous documentary about Berlin in the 1920s, made by a creative filmmaker who valiantly tries to recreate some of her family's story. 

In order to please her grandmother, Naomi Kaplansky (veteran documentary filmmaker from Israel TV), the filmmaker embarks on a journey to Berlin to uncover as much as possible about her family's legendary café, where people danced late into the night, laughed, ate to their heart's content, and possibly did even more.  

The Nagler family owned the cafe until 1925 and then immigrated to Palestine where they built a large and beautiful home that can still be seen in Haifa today.  One of the things so fascinating in this film is how the filmmaker goes about trying to find clues about her family during the Berlin period -- how she does her research, the quirky people she interviews and the archival material that she finds. 

What defines a documentary film?  How should a documentary filmmaker go about finding clues as to what might have happened in the past and who is to stay what is true memory?  This film, made with charm and immense creativity, tells the story of one particular Jewish family.  It is also about issues of memory and a fair amount of fantasy.  

Café Nagler (documentary, 59 minutes) is available from Go2Films.

The Life Story of Margot Klausner

Saga of a Photo, directed by Mooly Landesman, tells the fascinating life story of Margot Klausner -- a woman of great courage and vision, who is credited with being among the founders of the Habimah National Theater in the 1930s and responsible for the building of the first film studio in 1949.  Based on her diary entries, family photos, home movies, personal letters, and using dramatic re-enactments, her granddaughter tells the story of her life in this extraordinary documentary film. 

The film begins with this photo of Margot's wedding in 1926 Berlin to her first husband, Jacques Rosner.  During their honeymoon in Palestine, it is already clear that the young and elegant Margot is excited about the possibilities and challenges of life in Eretz Yisrael.  Her father owned a shoe factory and a chain of shoe stores throughout Europe.  She becomes involved with the Habimah actors who came to Berlin in those years and builds a special relationship with the manager, Yehoshua Brandstatter.  At that time, the actors were not all convinced that they wanted to make aliyah.  But Klausner and Brandstatter prove to be a formidable team, and using some of her family money, they bring the theater troupe to Tel Aviv where they establish the national theater and are part of its management for nine years.  

At this time Klausner and Brandstatter participate in their first film production -- the production of a remarkable landmark documentary film, Land of Promise, with original songs composed by Natan Alterman, which won first prize for documentary film at the Venice Biennale.  After the establishment of the State, they go on to use their personal resources to establish the first major film studio in Israel.  The ground was broken for the new building in 1949, and the film laboratory and sound stage were opened in 1952.  

The film also includes the personal side of Margot's life.  She had two children -- Miriam, the daughter that she had with Jacques, and Amos, the son that she had with Yehoshua.  Miriam's husband, Tzvi Spielman becomes the technical director of the Herzliyah Studios. 

 

Through the life of this remarkable woman, we are offered a glimpse at the history of Israeli theater (with vignettes from early Habimah productions) and milestones in Israeli filmmaking (with scenes from early productions such as Hill 24 Doesn't Answer).   In the 1960s, filmmaking in Israel becomes a bigger business, and the Studios were involved in the production of many important Israeli films such as The Boy Across the Street, I Love You Rosa, The Policeman, Sallah, and Peeping Toms, not to mention the thousands of documentary films, TV productions and newsreels that were processed in the studio labs.  

Margot Klausner was a woman with a vision.  In a country where cinema was not yet considered a cultural art, Klausner realized the importance of developing a film industry.  At the cornerstone-laying ceremony of the studios (July 3, 1949), the statement of goals included: It is the aim of the founders of these Studios to draw the attention of the nations towards our way of life in Israel, through the aid of movies, an art which has such a great influence in the world and reaches into all countries. 

The documentary film, Saga of a Photo (documentary, 80 minutes), is a fascinating look at the life of one woman, combining the personal with the national stories.  The film is available from Ruth Diskin Films.

The Flat by Arnon Goldfinger wins an award at Tribeca

This year, many groups asked me for recommendations for new films for Yom HaShoah and I recommended The Flat by Arnon Goldfinger.  It is an important film which deals with many issues of the third generation.

Ruth Diskin, the distributor of The Flat is proud to announce that the film has won the Best Editing in a Documentary Feature just last week at the Tribeca Film Festival. Check out the comments of the jury!

The Flat by Arnon Goldfinger wins the IsraelFilm.blogspot Award

I've decided to award my own prize for the best Israeli film screened at the recent Jerusalem Film Festival.  And the award goes to: Arnon Goldfinger's The Flat which is a triumph of personal documentary filmmaking.

 

Goldfinger's grandparents, Gerda and Kurt Tuchler, lived in an apartment in Tel Aviv since they came to Palestine in the 1930s.  When Gerda passed away at the age of 98, her grandson comes equipped with a camera to document his family as they begin to unravel the contents of the apartment which was stuffed with classics of German literature, heavy European furniture, old carpets, photos, letters, ladies' handbags and dozens of pairs of gloves, old luggage, and more.

Together with the filmmaker and his mother, we embark on a journey that begins in the closets of his grandparent's apartment in Tel Aviv and takes us to Germany to learn about his family history, exposing secrets from the past that are not so easy to deal with.

At the Festival screening, Goldfinger talked about how the film, "which began as a little film about the clean-up of Grandma Gerda's flat", took over his life and took five "exhausting" years to complete.

We follow his research, and like a mystery, a riveting story unravels before us.  We learn about his grandparents, meet Gerda's closest friend, and look at photos and letters.  Slowly a painful story unravels of a couple who remained tied to their roots in Germany, never fully became comfortable in Israel, and continued to return to Germany to visit with their German friends, even after the war.  Why would German Jews renew their deep friendship with a German blue-blood, von Mildenstein, who was a member of the Nazi party already in the 1930s and a member of the S.S. during the war? 

The research takes us to Germany and we learn about Grandma Gerda's mother and meet the von Mildenstein family.  Slowly we realize that this is not only an Israeli story but also a German story.  We learn about the difficulties of the second and third generation in grappling with the past.  Are they looking at it honestly or are they still hiding from the truth?  The comparison with the second and third generation here in Israel is amazing.  Grandma Gerda never talked about her mother to her own daughter, and her own daughter never asked how she died during the war. 

At the screening, Goldfinger explained, "I knew from the beginning that this had to be a co-production with a German company, with people of my generation."  In the film, he goes to archives to learn more about von Mildenstein, who apparently was quite an important figure in Goebbels' ministry.  Goldfinger meets with a German professor who is a specialist in Holocaust studies and asks him why his grandfather, who fled from Germany and raised a family in Israel, would re-establish his friendship with a Nazi friend after the war.  The professor explains that, in order to help them confirm their German identity, there were Jews who, after the Holocaust, were unable to negate all of German culture and history and desperately needed to believe that there were some good Germans.  This explained the complex identity of his grandparents.  Even though they lived in Israel for most of their lives, they remained tied to their German roots forever.

The filmmaker acknowledges having "rediscovered his mother" through making this film and dedicated his last comments to his grandmother and grandfather, expressing his hope that they would like the film, at least parts of it.  "If not, please forgive me."

The Flat won an award for best director of a documentary film at the Jerusalem Film Festival last week.  The statement of the jury is as follows: "This is a beautifully composed film about uncomfortable truths and the challenge of confronting them. Mr. Goldfinger undertakes expert research and leads us through his findings in a way that is not only gentle and sensitive, but also compelling and creative."

The Flat is available from First Hand Films  and Ruth Diskin Films.

The filmmaker, Arnon Goldfinger, is an accomplished documentary filmmaker, best known for his award-winning The Komediant (1999) which documents the story of Pesach Burstein and his wife, Lillian Lux, who together fled Poland in 1939 and were known as a legendary music-dance-comedy-theater team.