DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
This Wednesday is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, in commemoration of the date that Soviet troops liberated the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in 1945. It was in that camp that the parents of this documentary’s title characters were killed. Menachem and Fred were saved because their parents made the decision – before being moved to Auschwitz from the French-controlled camp where the entire family was initially imprisoned – to allow their children to be put in an orphanage for adoption. The two brothers ended up separated for most of their lives, one ending up in America, the other, Israel.
In part through the unlikely intervention of the son of one of the Nazis who sent the family away, the pair, now in their 70s, are reunited. The film, from directors Ofra Tevet and Ronit Kerstner, documents the process that led to their separation, as well as the circumstances that, 60 years later, would lead them back to one another. The film is an Israeli-German co-production, and the DCJCC’s local premiere of the film next week is sponsored by the embassies of both of those countries. Holocaust Museum historian Dr. Edna Friedburg will introduce the film.
View the trailer.
Tuesday at 7:30 p.m. at the Washington D.C. Jewish Community Center. $10.
—
The Goethe-Institut’s annual showcase of German film (with a few contributions from Switzerland and Austria, as well), begins tomorrow with Berlin Calling, a film set in the club culture of Berlin about a successful DJ dealing with mental illness. The festival continues with nine more selections over the next week, and, as always, it’s an impressive lineup of new films. Among them is the latest work from one of the most important German directors of the latter part of the 20th century and the (now, not so new) German New Cinema, Margarethe von Trotta. Her Vision looks at the 12th century Benedictine abbess, composer, and feminist Hildegard von Bingen. Another story of a religious gender role breaker is Sönke Wortmann’s Pope Joan, an English-language feature starring Johanna Wokalek and David Wenham in a film based on the likely fictitious legend of a woman who served as Pope during the Middle Ages. There’s also an action-thriller in the mix, with Philipp Stölzl’s North Face, about a 1936 attempt to scale the daunting Nordwand of Switzerland’s Eiger mountain, as well as a documentary about global commerce and capitalism, Erwin Wagenhofer’s Let’s Make Money.
View the trailer for Berlin Calling, the festival’s opening film.
Opens tomorrow, and continues through January 28 at E Street. See the Film|Neu website for a complete schedule, showtimes, and to purchase tickets.
