1st Block of Documentary Shorts

To this day Nazis who have taken part in crimes against humanity are being persecuted. The prosecution needs to prove the guilt of the 94-year-old Reinhold Hanning who worked as an SS guard at the Auschwitz concentration camp and says that he had not a clue about what was happening within its walls. Then the 3D model of the
Auschwitz as it used to be is created, and the jurors are given VR-helmets so that they can step into the Unterscharführer’s shoes and make a moral choice that he had once faced. Then they will make their own decision in real life by finding him guilty or not guilty in being involved in a hundred and fifty thousands of murders.

A Night at the Garden, dir. Marshall Curry

This montage film is made from previously unknown archival materials. It was nominated for an Oscar in 2019 in the Best Documentary Short Subject category (and was a part of the Short Film Program at the Sundance Film Festival), and shows us an almost forgotten meeting that took place in the Madison Square Garden, New York’s most famous arena - the meeting that was held by the German American Bund, a Nazi organization. It is 1939, and in the giant square Americans are making statements about white supremacy, not yet knowing into what horrors for Europe and the entire world will the Nazi regime turn into in just seven months when it invades Poland. A Night at the Garden turns out to be a chillingly relevant film for a divided America that recently saw yet another splash of race-based violence.

Arpad Weisz, dir. Pier Paolo Paganelli

This is an animated biography of Arpad Weisz told by Italian fans of his talent. Weisz was a Hungarian Jew, a talented football player and coach, whose career crashed because of the Fascist and Nazi regimes in Italy and the Netherlands, where he worked till his final days. At the age of thirty, he became the head of Inter, a Milanese football club, which instantly proved itself the strongest at the national championship. But then no one would hire Weisz any longer because he was a Jew, and in 1942 he and his family were arrested and died in the gas chamber at Auschwitz.

Edek, dir. Malcolm Green

This experimental film is made with a fast cutting technique that’s often used for music videos. Strictly speaking, it is a video to a rap track mixed from a recorded monologue of an 86-year-old Holocaust survivor Janine and complemented with couplets by a young

American rapper Kapoo. The symphony of life and memory, of rhythm and words, performed by means of radical montage, tells about a mysterious person by the name of Edek.

 
The Archive, dir. Peter Spence

This film is created with traditional documentary techniques – it is compiled from archival documents that include audio recordings by David Drucker, son of the Russian Jews who escaped before the Revolution, and Susan, his daughter. Drucker suffered not during the

Holocaust, but later during the McCarthy years, when he became a victim of the witch hunt and was suspected in collaboration with the communist regime, from which his family had run away. Together with Drucker, we witness the paradoxical paranoia that used to infect

America in those days.

Art Undercover, dir. Tamir Zadok

This is one of the stories in which it is hard to believe. Shlomo Cohen-Abarbanel, an Israeli Mossad secret agent who worked undercover in Egypt managed to convince everybody that he was a French abstractionist painter Charduval – and even sold some of his works depicting naive and primitive scenes from the life of the mysterious East. He became the subject of this post-documentary film (one that is beyond the feature/documentary division), around which its director Tamir Zadok, who also appears in Art Undercover, created an entire exhibition in the Tel Aviv Museum of Art in 2018. Tamir travels to Cairo in order to find Charduval’s paintings that were sold to the Museum of Modern Egyptian Art, while also trying not to give his identity away. This way Zadok is also creating art undercover, brilliantly carrying on the tradition of artistic espionage, alternating documentary episodes with scenes that but imitate real-life footage. The film becomes a match to the subject it explores.