holocaust

Inside Hana’s Suitcase

by Jay Kerr on May 15, 2009 · 6 comments

in Documentaries,Film Festivals,Hot Docs

Inside Hana’s Suitcase

Inside Hana’s Suitcase (Director: Larry Weinstein): Inside Hana’s Suitcase is beau­ti­fully crafted and easily one of the best films at Hot Docs this year. It’s based upon the the inter­na­tion­ally acclaimed book “Hana’s Suitcase” written by Karen Levine.

It’s a holo­caust story but don’t let that fool you into thinking it will be another depressing doc. Through a series of dra­matic re-enactments the film tells the real-life story of two Jewish chil­dren from Czechoslovakia, George and Hana Brady.

Things shift from the 1930s and 1940s world of Czechoslovakia to present-day Japan at the Tokyo Holocaust Museum. A suit­case with the name Hana Brady painted on it is delivered to the museum where Fumiko Ishioka and her stu­dents dis­cover that it came from Auschwitz. They examine the con­tents of the suit­case and learn as much as they can about Hana’s life and the war. Their journey leads to the dis­covery that Hana’s brother George is alive and living in Toronto. From there the story con­tinues to get more and more interesting.

Throughout the film, chil­dren from around the world tell Hana’s story and the les­sons they’ve learned from her exper­i­ence. I thought this was pure genius because it provides the audi­ence with a child’s per­spective of the war in a way that is powerful and full of hope.

Larry Weinstein’s dir­ec­tion is bril­liant and puts the film in the same league as last year’s Academy Award-winning film, Man On Wire. The period music and spe­cial effects trans­port the viewer back to the war while anim­a­tion of Hana’s draw­ings enrich the moviegoing experience.

Inside Hana’s Suitcase is a film about hope that chil­dren and adults can learn from and enjoy on many dif­ferent levels. I highly recom­mend this film and hope it gets a the­at­rical release.

Update: Inside Hana’s Suitcase was named as one of the top ten audi­ence favour­ites at Hot Docs this year.

Official site of the film

8/10(8/10)

Tagged as: #hotdocs09, holocaust, worldwar2

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Adam Resurrected

by James McNally on September 11, 2008 · 1 comment

in Film Festivals,TIFF

Adam Resurrected

Adam Resurrected (2008, Director: Paul Schrader): Let me begin by saying I have a lot of respect for the work of Paul Schrader. Anyone who has been both a screen­writer and a critic before becoming a dir­ector is bound to have my respect. Which is why I felt so miser­able leaving the screening last night. Adam Resurrected is an out-and-out stinker, and I’m sorry to say it.

To be com­pletely honest, I was a bit nervous going in. Films that try to see the comedy (black or oth­er­wise) in the Holocaust have rarely fared well. Jerry Lewis shelved his film The Day The Clown Cried (1972) after crit­ical out­rage, and Roberto Benigni’s Life is Beautiful (1997), des­pite a rap­turous recep­tion here at TIFF (one I wit­nessed in person) fell out of favour pretty quickly as well. Schrader’s film dif­fers in that he presents the “clown” char­acter, Adam Stein (Jeff Goldblum) as insane. When we meet him, it’s 1961 and he’s being escorted back (after an unsuc­cessful dis­charge) to a “pro­gressive” asylum in the Israeli desert spe­cific­ally for sur­vivors of the camps. He’s clearly the star patient, enter­taining the other patients and even the staff with his quick wit, and car­rying on a love affair with a gor­geous nurse. The head doctor (Derek Jacobi) indulges him endlessly.

Through flash­backs, we dis­cover that he lost his wife and daugh­ters in a con­cen­tra­tion camp while he him­self was spared. The camp com­mandant (Willem Defoe) recog­nizes him from his nightclub act and decides to keep him as his pet. And I mean this quite lit­er­ally. He forces Adam to act as his dog, barking and walking around on all fours. Since he’s also a tal­ented musi­cian, he’s also used to soothe the inmates with violin music on their way to the gas chambers.

The plot becomes even more bizarre when a boy shows up at the asylum thinking he’s a dog. Adam gradu­ally reaches out to him, based on his own memories, and brings both the boy and him­self back to life (hence the portentous title). That’s the psy­cho­lo­gical resur­rec­tion, anyway. Physically, Adam appears to be invul­ner­able. He seems to be able to bleed at will, and to heal him­self of tumours. It’s no wonder that one of the inmates con­siders him the Messiah.

The film is based on a famous and rather con­tro­ver­sial Israeli novel by Yoram Kaniuk, pub­lished in 1971. Significantly, Schrader said the book came out in the same gen­eral era as Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961) and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five (1969), two other chal­lenges to the typ­ical depic­tion of war­time exper­i­ences. Famously, both of those novels were called unfil­mable, and the films made from them have never really been con­sidered successful.

Goldblum, as always, jumps in with both feet, but his strange accent and tend­ency to mutter left much of his dia­logue inde­cipher­able. Defoe and Jacobi are just wasted in paper-thin roles, and the film is fur­ther marred by an abund­ance of shaky hand­held cam­er­a­work. In the end, I just didn’t care about this strange char­acter, and I found myself rolling my eyes more than once at the ham­fisted metaphors.

Here is the Q&A with dir­ector Paul Schrader, actor Jeff Goldblum, screen­writer Noah Stollman and pro­ducer Ehud Bleiberg from after the screening:

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Duration: 15:56

4/10(4/10)

Tagged as: #tiff08, holocaust, israel, worldwar2

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