Past Events - Fall 2007

Nazi holocaust film series 2007

**All films are shown in the Greenbriar Theater located in the Student Union at 2 pm on Sundays.**

 

Fiddler on the Roof 8/26
         This rousing Academy Award winning musical, based on the stories of Shalom Aleichem, takes place in pre-revolutionary Russia and centers on the life of Tevye (Topol), a Jewish milkman who is trying to keep his family’s traditions in place while marrying off his three older daughters. Yet, times are changing and the daughters want to make their own matches, breaking free of many of the constricting customs required of them by Judaism. In the background of these events, Russia is on the brink of revolution and Jews are feeling increasingly unwelcome in their villages. Tevye—who expresses his desire for sameness in the opening number, “Tradition” –is trying to keep everyone, and everything, together. The movie is strongly allegorical—Tevye represents the common man—but it does it dexterously, and the resulting film is a stunning work of art. Isaac Stern’s violin—he provides the music for the fiddler on the roof—is hauntingly beautiful. 179 min.

A Stranger Among Us 9/9
          In this film Melanie Griffith is cast as a tough New York City cop, Emily Edith. When a brutal murder occurs among the Hasidic Jews Emily goes undercover in the Hasidic community to find the culprit of this heinous crime. (1992) 110 minutes.

Triumph of the Will 9/30
           Triumph of the Will was commissioned by Hitler in 1934 and directed by Leni Riefenstahl. This piece of Nazi propaganda covers the events of the Sixth Nuremberg Party Congress. The original intention was to document the early days of the NSDAP, so future generations could look back and see how the Third Reich began. In reality, Triumph of the Will shows historians how the Nazi state drew in the masses through propaganda and also how Adolf Hitler had a unique and terrifying ability to entice crowds to his beliefs by the very power of his words. (1934) 110 minutes.

Conspiracy 10/7
            This film is a dramatic historical recreation of the infamous meeting on Jan. 20, 1942, at which top Nazis planned the implementation of the Holocaust. Chaired by the feared SS general Reinhard Heydrich and attended by Adolf Eichmann and fourteen other Third Reich bureaucratic accomplices, this two-hour meeting decided how the Jews of Europe would be rounded up, transported to the East, and murdered using poison gas. The meeting, held in one of Berlin’s most opulent villas, lasted less than two hours. The documentary is based on the Wannsee Protocol, the sole surviving transcript of this meeting, and features Kenneth Branagh as Heydrich and Stanely Tucci as Adolf Eichmann. (2001) 115 minutes.

The Pianist 10/21
            Winner of the prestigious Golden Palm award at the 2002 Cannes film festival, “The Pianist” tells the story of Wladyslaw Szpilman, a Polish Jew and concert pianist (played by Adrien Brody) who witnessed the Nazi invasion of Warsaw, miraculously eluded the Nazi death camps, and survived throughout WWII by hiding among the ruins of the Warsaw ghetto. Directed by Roman Polanski, himself a childhood survivor of Nazi-occupied Poland, this film presents an epic of wartime survival. (2002) 150 minutes.

Triumph of the Spirit 10/28
            Oscar nominees Willem Dafoe, Edward James Olmos, and Robert Loggia present an extraordinary story of life and death in Auschwitz during the Holocaust. Based on a true story, this film follows the nightmare of a Greek boxer who literally fights for his life to entertain SS officers, knowing that each victory condemns his opponents to the gas chambers. This is the only commercial film about the Holocaust ever filmed on location in Auschwitz. (1989) 120 min.

The Nasty Girl 11/4
            Sonja, a German high school student played by Lena Stolze, decides to write an essay about her town's history during WWII and its resistance of the Third Reich. To her dismay, and more so the town's, she uncovers instead definite collaboration with the Nazis during the period. As she digs deeper, she must struggle against the town's vocal and violent opposition to her search for the truth. (1991) 92 min.

 

The Trials of Darryl Hunt 11/11
            "The Trials of Darryl Hunt" is a feature documentary about a brutal rape/murder case and a wrongly convicted man, Darryl Hunt, who spent nearly twenty years in prison for a crime he did not commit. Both a social justice story and a personally driven narrative, the film chronicles this capital case from 1984 through 2004. With exclusive footage from two decades, the film frames the judicial and emotional response to a chilling crime - and the implications that reverberate from Hunt's conviction - against a backdrop of class and racial bias in the South and in the American criminal justice system. This documentary is the culmination of ten years of research and filming. (1996) 106 minutes.