Want two excellent reasons to attend this year’s Jewish International Film Festival? Here you go…..
Stranger than fiction, AVENGING EVIL is the astonishing true story of a stupendous plot for revenge in the aftermath of World War II.
Long before the Marvel comic book Avengers, there was a secret organisation of Holocaust survivors who based their extremism on an eye for an eye, in retaliation for another extremism – the death of six million Jews and the humiliation of countless more.
This unit plotted the extermination of six million Germans, a revenge possibly unparalleled in modern history.
This amazing documentary is a journey of discovery, unearthing hitherto publicly unknown facts with interviews with surviving agents, now geriatrics, some still seething with righteous fury and disappointment that the plan did not succeed.
Even more astonishing, as the initial plot failed, a Plan B was put in place, and came within a whisker of success. The term Judgement at Nuremberg would have taken on a completely different complexion, irony heaped on irony.
What is justice, what is revenge, is there a difference? AVENGING ANGEL is an important film, not only for disclosing unknown or little known history, but for giving oxygen to profound questions about dealing with evil, what is right and fitting punishment, and the rule of law.
David Niven’s second book of memoirs goes by the title, Bring On The Empty Horses, reputedly the command uttered on the set of The Charge of the Light Brigade by director, Michael Curtiz, to release a hundred riderless chargers.
Curtiz’s Hungarian orientated tainted English is at show in Tamas Yvan Topolanszky’s stylish and elegant film, CURTIZ, when a props man mistakenly hears a request for more puddles as a command for a bunch of poodles.
Set during the making of Casablanca, this gorgeously art directed and beautifully shot film delves into the make up of the man and the fraught construction of what has become one of the most loved and iconic motion pictures in history.
Ferenc Lengyel eerily takes on the Curtiz look and persona, a man spurred by ambition and success who spurns his past and is troubled by his failure to help free his relatives from war torn Europe.
CURTIZ ingeniously and effortlessly runs the parallel tale of personal and professional life, each feeding into one another, real life finding expression in reel life.
The behind the scenes story of the making of Casablanca is intriguing with studio boss, Jack Warner, producer Hal Wallis and a cold blooded government man, Johnson, all running interference to Curtiz’s vision.
The world was in turmoil – the Nazis were overrunning Europe and the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbour, bringing America into World War II. Time was of the essence to make an admonitory picture that would foster popular support of American involvement in the liberation of Europe. It was to prove an admirable exercise in admonition but not without an arduous journey.
In CURTIZ, the director is concerned that the propaganda propagated will capsize the art and truth of the matter. He encouraged the writers, the Epstein brothers, to eschew the trite and repetitive stresses, or any embittered or sentimental fulsomeness.
The screenplay for CURTIZ is similarly illustrative of the man’s power of narrative invention. Observe a small scene with Christopher Krieg as Conrad Veidt who played the SS Officer Strasser in Casablanca. In a break in shooting, there he is, between takes, in full Nazi uniform but wearing a yarmulke.
2019 Jewish International Film Festival screening dates:
SYDNEY 23 October – 21 November Ritz Cinema, Randwick
2 November – 20 November Roseville Cinemas, Roseville
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