A young girl and her mother both carry the scars of their experiences during the holocaust in this drama from Israel. In 1951, Aviya is a ten-year-old girl being raised by her single mother, Henya, in a small village in Israel. Henya is a survivor of a Nazi concentration camp, and has come out of the experience considerably worse for wear; she’s haunted by the memories of her past, and has become emotionally unstable. Circumstances for her and her daughter are hardly improved by the poverty of the newly wounded state of Israel, and their own difficult economic circumstances. Aviya, meanwhile, is obsessed with finding her missing father, and wonders if he might be the man who has just moved into their village. Henya, however, knows better, and knows why Aviya’s father is never coming back to them.
Tag: holocaust (shoah) survivor
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Little Big Sister
An intimate profile of Hédi Fried, a Swedish writer, therapist and her little sister Livia Fränkel, both Holocaust survivors. While Hédi is very active among other survivors and in opinion-making, Livia chooses to forget.
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Left Luggage
While escaping from Nazis during the WWII, a Jewish man dug suitcases full of things dear to his heart in the ground two. The war deprived him of his family, and afterwards he endlessly turns over the soil of Antwerp to find the suitcases, which makes him look obsessed. He keeps checking old maps and keeps digging, trying to find, in fact, those he lost. His daughter Chaya is a beautiful modern girl looking for a part-time job. She finds a place as a nanny in the strictly observant Chassidic family with many children, although her secular manners clearly fly in the face of many commandments. One of the reasons she is accepted is that mother of the family is absolutely overburdened by the household, so she stays despite the resistance of the father, normally – an indisputable authority in the family. She develops a special bond with the youngest of the boys, four-year old Simcha, so far incapable of speaking.
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Facing Windows
Overburdened and stuck in a greying marriage, Giovanna takes to caring for a Jewish Holocaust survivor her husband brings home. As she begins to reflect on her life, she turns to the man who lives across from her.
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Misa’s Fugue
The true story of one boy’s journey as a victim of Nazi oppression. While exposed to some of the most horrific events of the Holocaust, Misa was able to endure the atrocities of genocide through his love of art and music.
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Vita Activa: The Spirit of Hannah Arendt
The life and work of German political philosopher of Jewish descent Hannah Arendt (1906-75), who caused a stir when she coined a subversive concept, the banality of evil, in her 1963 book on the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolph Eichmann (1906-62), held in Israel in 1961, which she covered for the New Yorker magazine.
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The Real End of the Great War
Róża marries a promising young architect, Juliusz. Then World War II breaks out and within weeks Juliusz is deported to a concentration camp. Months, and then years go by, until Róża abandons any hope that her husband might return. She meets and falls in love with another man, and tries to put her life back together, but one day, unexpectedly, Juliusz does return – a shattered, mere ghost of his former self, physically crippled and tormented by memories of the camps. First out of duty, then out of pity, Róża starts to care for him, but her feelings slowly are transformed into a kind of revulsion
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The Photographer of Mauthausen
Spanish photographer Francesc Boix, imprisoned in the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp, works in the SS Photographic Service. Between 1943 and 1945, he hides, with the help of other prisoners, thousands of negatives, with the purpose of showing the freed world the atrocities committed by the Nazis, exhaustively documented. He will be a key witness during the Nuremberg Trials.
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We Were the Lucky Ones
The true story of one Jewish family separated at the start of World War II, determined to survive—and to reunite.
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The Brutalist
Escaping post-war Europe, visionary architect László Toth arrives in America to rebuild his life, his work, and his marriage to his wife Erzsébet after being forced apart during wartime by shifting borders and regimes. On his own in a strange new country, László settles in Pennsylvania, where the wealthy and prominent industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren recognizes his talent for building. But power and legacy come at a heavy cost.