Novi Sad Remembrance (2024)

Warsaw: A City Divided

The history of the Warsaw Ghetto (1940-43) as seen from both sides of the wall, its legacy and its memory: new light on a tragic era of division, destruction and mass murder thanks to the testimony of survivors and the discovery of a ten-minute film shot by Polish amateur filmmaker Alfons Ziółkowski in 1941.

Memories of a Nazi Camp

Holocaust survivors describe their experiences being interred at the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp.

Golda Maria

In 1994, film producer Patrick Sobelman recorded the testimony of his grandmother Golda Maria Tondovska, a Polish Jewish survivor of the Shoah.

2 or 3 Things I Know About Him

What would your family reminiscences about dad sound like if he had been an early supporter of Hitler’s, a leader of the notorious SA and the Third Reich’s minister in charge of Slovakia, including its Final Solution? Executed as a war criminal in 1947, Hanns Ludin left behind a grieving widow and six young children, the youngest of whom became a filmmaker. It's a fascinating, maddening, sometimes even humorous look at what the director calls "a typical German story." (Film Forum)

The Death Train

In Iasi, Romania, from June 28 to July 6, 1941, nearly 15 000 Jews were murdered in the course of a horrifying pogrom. At the time, the programmed extermination of European Jews had not yet began. After the war, the successive communist governments did all they could to ensure the Iasi pogrom would be forgotten. It was not until November of 2004 that Romania recognized for the first time its direct responsibility in the pogrom. All that remains of this massacre are about a hundred photographs taken as souvenirs by german and romanian soldiers, and a few remaining survivors.

Schindler

The true story of German-Czech businessman Oskar Schindler (1908-74) as told by some of the Jews — more than a thousand people — whose lives he saved from extermination during World War II.

The Lady in Number 6: Music Saved My Life

The story of Alice Herz-Sommer, a German-speaking Jewish pianist from Prague who was, at her death, the world's oldest Holocaust survivor. She discusses the importance of music, laughter, and how to have an optimistic outlook on life.

Death Mills

Originally made with a German soundtrack for screening in occupied Germany and Austria, this film was the first documentary to show what the Allies found when they liberated the Nazi extermination camps: the survivors, the conditions, and the evidence of mass murder. The film includes accounts of the economic aspects of the camps' operation, the interrogation of captured camp personnel, and the enforced visits of the inhabitants of neighboring towns, who, along with the rest of their compatriots, are blamed for complicity in the Nazi crimes - one of the few such condemnations in the Allied war records.

12 March: Raid

Revolutionaries passed before the streets of the 1960s on the road to democracy. Then the use of victory songs and rebellion flags, right-wingers, leftists and putschists again. The February 22nd Operation could not revolutionize, but it succeeded in overthrowing its government. Unexpectedly, because of an amnesty... İnönü kept Talat Aydemir's forgiveness by making a promise to him when he received him and drafting a law. But when this structure came to the Parliament, the AP members revolted. They also asked for the ex-Democrats to be pardoned. They said "all or nothing". It's a mess. When the AP insisted, İnönü resigned. Thus, without doing much work, Turkey's first settlement was dissolved in six months. İnönü was brought to the head of the new crime again. However, this time, EP was excluded and a second provision government was formed with CHP, YTP and CKMP. And the winds blowing from Kayseri would continue to sweep Ankara more...

Seeds of Destiny

Oscar winning postwar propaganda film in support of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. Strident but poignant, focusing on children. The film surveys the Nazi/Japanese atrocities, post-war devastation and the early relief efforts. This film was responsible for raising over $200,000,000, making it a top moneymaking film. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2005.

Erna, Helmut and the Nazis

Germany, 1929. Helmut Machemer and Erna Schwalbe fall madly in love and marry in 1932. Everything indicates that a bright future awaits them; but then, in 1933, Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party rise to power and their lives are suddenly put in danger because of Erna's Jewish ancestry.

German Concentration Camps Factual Survey

On the 29th September 1945, the incomplete rough cut of a brilliant documentary about concentration camps was viewed at the MOI in London. For five months, Sidney Bernstein had led a small team – which included Stewart McAllister, Richard Crossman and Alfred Hitchcock – to complete the film from hours of shocking footage. Unfortunately, this ambitious Allied project to create a feature-length visual report that would damn the Nazi regime and shame the German people into acceptance of Allied occupation had missed its moment. Even in its incomplete form (available since 1984) the film was immensely powerful, generating an awed hush among audiences. But now, complete to six reels, this faithfully restored and definitive version produced by IWM, is being compared with Alain Resnais’ Night and Fog (1955).

The Pageant

Every year since 2011, a unique beauty contest has been taking place in Haifa. The contestants are female survivors of the Holocaust. In the midst of this flashy spectacle, their personal traumas remain as deep as ever. There are many things about this contest that are controversial: it is organized by the right Zionist organization, the International Christian Embassy Jerusalem, and the dubious contest itself rises the public indignation of various speakers, including other survivors.

Made in Auschwitz: The Untold Story of Block 10

Around 80 years ago, the gynecologist Carl Clauberg conducted medical experimentation on Jewish girls and women in Auschwitz. The results of those sadistic experiments were used in medicine across the globe. It is possible that German companies played a part in those experiments. Most of the survivors became infertile, and very few of them were later capable to give birth. The Untold Story of Block 10 introduces the audience to those who have survived.

Three Minutes: A Lengthening

The story of the only three minutes of footage —a home movie shot by David Kurtz in 1938— showing images of the Jewish inhabitants of Nasielsk (Poland) before the beginning of the Shoah.

Dead Gay Men and Living Lesbians

As a result of the Holocaust and later, AIDS, the male homosexual community has sustained bitter losses and, according to Praunheim, lesbian women have now placed themselves at the head of the so-called queer movement. The female protagonists in the film represent two different generations; they also incorporate the past and present status of homosexuals in society.

Chaja & Mimi

Chaja Florentin and Mimi Frons have been best friends for 83 years. Born and raised in Berlin, they had to escape from the Nazis to Palestine with their families in 1934. They talk about their complicated relationship with Berlin in a Tel Aviv café where they meet everyday. A film about friendship, homeland and identity.

Monsieur Mayonnaise

Artist and filmmaker Philippe Mora (Mad Dog Morgan; The Howling II; Swastika) is producing a graphic novel about his late father, Georges, widely known in Melbourne as a beloved contemporary art patron and owner of bohemian eateries Mirka Café, Café Balzac and the Tolarno Restaurant and Galleries. Less known, however, is Georges' astonishing history as part of the French resistance during World War II, his friendship with renowned mime Marcel Marceau (Philippe's godfather), and how together they saved thousands of Jewish lives with a fiendishly simple trick involving baguettes and mayonnaise.

Shoah

Director Claude Lanzmann spent 11 years on this sprawling documentary about the Holocaust, conducting his own interviews and refusing to use a single frame of archival footage. Dividing Holocaust witnesses into three categories – survivors, bystanders, and perpetrators – Lanzmann presents testimonies from survivors of the Chelmno concentration camp, an Auschwitz escapee, and witnesses of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, as well as a chilling report of gas chambers from an SS officer at Treblinka.

Besa: The Promise

A documentary exploring how Albanians, including many Muslims, helped and sheltered Jewish refugees during WWII at their own risk, and trying to help the son of an Albanian baker that housed a Jewish family for a year return some Hebrew books that the family had to leave behind.

Hôtel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie

Marcel Ophuls' riveting film details the heinous legacy of the Gestapo head dubbed "The Butcher of Lyon." Responsible for over 4,000 deaths in occupied France during World War II, Barbie would escape—with U.S. help—to South America in 1951, where he lived until a global manhunt led to his 1983 arrest and subsequent trial.

Ukraine: Holocaust Ground Zero

An exploration of the shocking impact of the Holocaust in Ukraine, where some of the most horrific Nazi massacres of World War II occurred. Featuring contributions from Holocaust survivors.

Paragraph 175

During the Nazi regime, there was widespread persecution of homosexual men, which started in 1871 with the Paragraph 175 of the German Penal Code. Thousands were murdered in concentration camps. This powerful and disturbing documentary, narrated by Rupert Everett, presents for the first time the largely untold testimonies of some of those who survived.

Elie Wiesel Goes Home

A documentary chronicling the adolescent years of Elie Wiesel and the history of his sufferings. Eliezer was fifteen when Fascism brutally altered his life forever. Fifty years later, he returns to Sighetu Marmatiei, the town where he was born, to walk the painful road of remembrance - but is it possible to speak of the unspeakable? Or does Auschwitz lie beyond the capacity of any human language - the place where words and stories run out?

Paper Clips

Whitwell, TN is a small, rural community of less than two thousand people nestled in the mountains of Tennessee. Its citizens are almost exclusively white and Christian. In 1998, the children of Whitwell Middle School took on an inspiring project, launched out of their principal's desire to help her students open their eyes to diversity in the world and the horrors and enormity of the holocaust.

Resistance: They Fought Back

We’ve all heard of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, but most people have no idea how widespread and prevalent Jewish resistance to Nazi barbarism was. Instead, it’s widely believed “Jews went to their deaths like sheep to the slaughter.” Filmed in Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Israel, and the U.S., Resistance – They Fought Back provides a much-needed corrective to this myth of Jewish passivity. There were uprisings in ghettos large and small, rebellions in death camps, and thousands of Jews fought Nazis in the forests. Everywhere in Eastern Europe, Jews waged campaigns of non-violent resistance against the Nazis.

Terrorists in Retirement

Not just another documentary on the French resistance movement, this film focuses on one particular group of underground fighters in France: those from Eastern Europe. Many were Jews and all had fled their native countries before the war broke out. They were among the most staunch and fearless enemies of fascism, as shown here in personal interviews and memoirs of war-time experiences. But the most famous of these immigrants were 23 who were rounded up among several hundred Parisians in 1943, tried for their activities, and executed -- all were immigrants under the leadership of the Armenian poet Manouchian. After their execution, Paris was papered with posters decrying these 23 martyrs as "foreign communists."

The Last Musician of Auschwitz

Tells the extraordinary story of Anita Lasker-Wallfisch who, along with other victims of Auschwitz, played and created music amidst the terrors of the Holocaust.

Mathi Schenk's Last Journey to Poland

In the summer of 2001, 75-year-old Mathi Schenk made his last trip to Poland, following in the footsteps of his own past. He lives in the eastern cantons of Belgium, which were forcibly united with the German Reich after the invasion of German troops in May 1940. Those who did not volunteer for the Wehrmacht were – like Mathi Schenk – sent to war as forced soldiers for Germany. When the Warsaw Uprising broke out in August 1944, the 18-year-old arrived in the Polish capital and was assigned to the notorious SS Dirlewanger Brigade. During the 63 days of bitter fighting, which cost the lives of more than 200,000 Poles, he witnessed unimaginable atrocities against the people of Warsaw. While fleeing the Red Army, Polish farmers found the young soldier wounded in a ditch. Despite his German uniform, they hid him from the Russians in their village.

Ravensbrück: The forgotten camp

Located nearly 80 kilometres north of Berlin, Germany, the former municipality of Ravensbrück was home to a prison between 1939 and 1945 that became a concentration camp designed specifically for women. It was built by order of Heinreich Himmler, a high dignitary of the Third Reich and head of the SS. Of the more than 130,000 people who were deported there, almost 90,000 never returned. Based on witnesses, international experts and computer-generated images, the document reveals the atrocities committed in Ravensbrück.

Jacques Doriot, le petit Führer français

Plot unavailable

Inside a Nazi Mind: The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell

An analysis of The Kindly Ones, Jonathan Littell's controversial novel, published in 2006, which dissects the ruthless mechanisms of the Shoah from the detached point of view of Maximilian Aue, a high-ranking Nazi officer.

Sobibor, October 14, 1943, 4 p.m.

Documentary interview with Yehuda Lerner, who at 17 participated in a prisoner revolt at the Nazi-run Sobibor extermination camp. Originally filmed for inclusion in Lanzmann's 1985 documentary Shoah.

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.

Algeria 1943: A Colony Under Vichy Control

World War II, June 1940. France has fallen and suffers the relentless boot of Nazi Germany. But Algeria, the prized French colony in North Africa, remains part of the territory controlled by the Vichy regime of Marshal Pétain. A strict colonial order is maintained: the French of European origin rule, while local Jews are stripped of French citizenship and discrimination against the mainly Muslim population increases.

Imaginary Witness: Hollywood and the Holocaust

Daniel Anker’s 90-minute documentary takes on over 60 years of a very complex subject: Hollywood’s complicated, often contradictory relationship with Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. The questions it raises go right the very nature of how film functions in our culture, and while hardly exhaustive, Anker’s film makes for a good, thought provoking starting point.