This documentary film is a requiem to the Jewish cemetery in Lodz, known before the war as one of the richest in funerary architecture in Europe. In this cemetery, massive in size, against the landscape of decay and ruin caused by time and neglect, the film shows four mourners carrying a coffin, and moving through the desolate landscape like restless sleepers unable to wake up from a nightmare. Since the film was shot, some attempts at restoration of the cemetery have been made after the political changes in Poland. The film is a record of an important monument to Jewish presence in the city of Lodz.
This film combines the documentary genre with the cabaret. Only 25 years after Nazi Germany carried out the Holocaust on Polish soil, 30,000 Jews, including intelligentsia, scientists, artists and exceptional writers, were expelled from Poland. In the anti-Semitic campaign sponsored by the state in March 1968 in Communist Poland, the last Holocaust survivors - in the pre-war country of more than three million Jewish citizens - were declared "Foreigners," "Zionists," "Cosmopolites," and "Enemies of the Polish People's Republic", and forced to leave the country. Many of the emmigrants found shelter in Scandinavia,...
When one hears the words "Warsaw Ghetto Uprising" in Israel, the name that immediately comes to mind is Mordecai Anielewicz, leader of the uprising from the Zionist Shomer HaTzair movement. Until not long ago, few in Israel knew much about Marek Edelman-the representative of the non-Zionist socialist Bund in the uprising, and the one who took command after Anielewicz's death. After the War, Edelman chose to stay in Poland rather than immigrate to Israel like many of his comrades-in-arms, although he stayed in contact with colleagues such as Antek Zuckerman and Zvia Lubetkin. Edelman studied medicine in Łodz,...
In the early 1960s the Brodzkys, the Baumritters and the Burgins, three families of ideological communists of mostly Jewish origin who remained friends, decided to buy a plot of land at Dłużek lake on the outskirts of Mazury, Poland’s lake district, to build summer homes. But, a wave of anti-Semitism forced the members of the Polish communist elite, who barely considered themselves Jewish, to emigrate from Poland in 1968. Most went to Sweden, Denmark, France, U.S. and Canada, and some to Israel - but before they left, they spent their last weeks crowded into the lake house The documentary was made by Stanisław...
A story of the pre-war Krakow as seen by the Jews. Unique archive materials, which had not been published before, present their carefree youth which was suddenly disrupted and turned into the hell of the Holocaust. Some of them left Poland after the war but they keep coming back t oKrakow, a city full of childhood memories.
Filmed in Rome and Austria, this TV biopic tells the story of Pope John Paul II, Pope of the Roman Catholic Church from 16.10.1978 until his death in 2005. The story begins in 1938, when teen-aged Karol Wojtyla, a would-be actor, decides instead to enter the priesthood. Played from age 26 onward by actor Albert Finney, Wojtyla spends WWII years in the Polish anti-Nazi movement. He continues battling for his beliefs with the Communist-ruled Polish government in the postwar years. In 1978, Wojtyla is elected to succeed Pope John Paul I, thereby becoming the first non-Italian pope in 4 centuries. Relations between...
A documentary film abut a group of Mexican youth who travel to Poland. The youngsters talk about their feelings prior to the trip and afterwards are seen in their visits to Warsaw, Krakow, Treblinka, Lublin, Majdanek. Their visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau coincides with the marching of Israeli soldiers accompanied by the Chief Rabbi Yisrael Lau.