Coming to DVD tomorrow, Tuesday, April 9: THE LAST FLIGHT OF PETR GINZ
Sandra Dickson and Churchill Roberts’ creative recounting of one boy’s experience of the Holocaust has screened at a number of Jewish film festivals over the past year, including Atlanta, Toronto, Zagreb, Cleveland, Hong Kong, Warsaw, UK, Washington, Houston, and Miami. The film has also screened at the Czech Republic’s Zlin children’s fest, and picked up a special award at last year’s Jerusalem International Film Festival.
Dickson and Roberts’ film tells the story of a young Polish Holocaust victim through his surviving diaries and imaginative drawings and stories, produced while he was held at the Terezin concentration camp before his murder at Auschwitz at the age of sixteen. His journals, and his sister’s narration, relate the harsh reality of life in Poland under the Nazi occupation, but it is in Ginz’s fictional writing and artwork that he let his imagination free him from his bonds. Inspired by Jules Verne and other science fiction writers, the young man wrote numerous novels, including a thinly-veiled indictment of the Nazis in the form of mechanical monsters trying to enslave the world, and, most remarkably, a secret underground literary journal co-produced with fellow camp prisoners. His experiences structure this film, with animated segments in different styles reflecting both his real-life and fictional flights of fancy. While some of the storytelling and journal recital sequences overstay their welcome, the filmmakers have made a concerted effort to produce a very different kind of Holocaust narrative – one that celebrates life, creativity, and defiance even in the direst of circumstances – and in that they have decidedly succeeded.
what (not) to doc 