A Story No One Has Told Yet A Story No One Has Told Yet
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Photo by Anna Włoch, courtesy of the film’s producers
Experiences

A Story No One Has Told Yet

An Interview with Nancy Spielberg and Anna Różalska
Paulina Małochleb
Reading
time 10 minutes

“When we were looking for filming locations and actors, and watched the subsequent versions of the edit, we focused on technical issues and professional challenges. Today, following the subsequent premieres in various cities, we can only hope that we have helped create a film that will outlive us, because it tells a tremendously important story,” says Anna Różalska, interviewed alongside Nancy Spielberg. Różalska and Spielberg are the producers of the film Who Will Write Our History (dir. Roberta Grossman).

Dr Emanuel Ringelblum – a Jewish social activist. During the war, he decided to stay in the Warsaw Ghetto with his family. The originator and guardian of the Oyneg Shabes group that collected materials describing life in the Warsaw Ghetto and other ghettos. A Marxist. After the liquidation of the Ghetto, he went into hiding on the Aryan side, and was subsequently betrayed and handed over to the Nazis. Together with his wife and son, he was executed in the ruins of the Ghetto. Their bodies were never found.

Oyneg Shabes – a group of a few dozen people who, while in the Ghetto, documented the living conditions of Jews, Nazi politics, the state of consciousness of the imprisoned, and Polish-Jewish relations. The name of the group means ‘the Joy of the Sabbath’. The archive created by the group is now available to view at the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw and

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A Cinema of Frustration in Impatient Times A Cinema of Frustration in Impatient Times
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László Nemes on the set of the film “Sunset”. Image courtesy of Gutek Film.
Fiction

A Cinema of Frustration in Impatient Times

An Interview with László Nemes
Magdalena Maksimiuk

We first heard of László Nemes in 2015 after his spectacular debut Son of Saul at the Cannes Film Festival. It was a magnificent year for European cinema, with the biggest names in the industry running for the Palme d’Or – including Paolo Sorrentino, Yorgos Lanthimos and Jacques Audiard.

Nemes did not win in Cannes, but still brought home four other awards, including the Jury Prize. Meanwhile, Son of Saul continued its triumphant march around global film festivals, ending with the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. The staggeringly long list of awards for the Hungarian director’s debut is the best proof that sometimes taking creative risks can pay off. It took Nemes a long time to collect resources for this challenging and extremely demanding project, based on a very personal story. Many members of the director’s family lost their lives in concentration camps during the Holocaust, and all they left behind were a few yellowed photographs. Son of Saul was conceived from the deep need to tell the story of the Holocaust in a different way than others have, such as Steven Spielberg. The film was made out of frustration with the simplifications and shortcuts taken by Hollywood productions when trying to show an unimaginable tragedy from a place of comfortable distance. Sunset – the latest feature production by Nemes – is just as personal as his first film, this time telling a story based on his grandmother’s childhood memories of the time between the two world wars, steeped in the vibrant atmosphere of fin de siècle Europe.

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