Monday, November 5, 2012

Jason goes to SVJFF and sees REMEMBRANCE

Last Thursday I was down at the Camera 7 for another SVJFF (aka Jewfest South) screening. The film was REMEMBRANCE, a based-on-a-true-story drama of the Holocaust, survival, and the past returning to you. In 1976 Hannah Levine, a wife in Brooklyn is preparing for her husband's important dinner party. At the cleaners, she catches a glimpse of an interview with a Holocaust survivor talking about his lover with whom he escaped a concentration camp. And she thinks he might be her long-lost love (whom she thought was dead) talking about her.

So we flash back to the camps. Back then she was Hannah Silberstein, and she fell in love with Tomasz Limanowski, a Pole in the camp (she, obviously, was there because she was Jewish.) Tomasz has an incredible skill to get anything you might need, he even procures Russian vodka for the guards. And he uses his skills to smuggle them both out of the camp.

Anyway, I don't want to get to spoiler-y, but the short version is they were separated for some time after the escape, and through misunderstandings they both believed the other was dead. And they both went on with their lives, got married, and had generally good lives. And bringing up this past and learning her old lover was alive is a very complicated and bittersweet realization for her. While the escape/on the run scenes from the past are exciting, the real emotional core of the film is her struggles with this new information and how it affects her whole family.

Running Time: 106 minutes
My Total Minutes: 302,276

No comments: