"... sorry, I'm alive"
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| German title | "... sorry, I'm alive" |
| Original title | "Przepraszam, ze zyje" |
| Country of production | Germany , Poland |
| original language | Polish , German |
| Publishing year | 2000 |
| length | 81 minutes |
| Rod | |
| Director | Andrzej Klamt |
| script | Andrzej Klamt, Marek Pelc |
| production | Esther Schapira |
| music | Ulrich Rydzewski |
| camera | Vladimir Majdandzic |
| cut | Zygmunt Dus , Ewa Dus |
| occupation | |
| |
“… Excuse me, I'm alive” (original title “Przepraszam, ze zyje” ) is a German - Polish documentary by Andrzej Klamt from the year 2000. Some Jewish people, whose home was once the small Polish town of Będzin , embark on a journey into their past which tells of fear, despair and shame towards murdered fellow human beings. The images of what they had to experience keep catching up with them and shape them.
content
After 1945, 2,400 private photographs of Jews from the small Polish town of Będzin, located on the edge of the Upper Silesian coal mine, were found in the Auschwitz extermination camp . The vast majority of the people depicted in the photos died in the horror of the Holocaust . A few of the 27,000 Jews who used to live in Będzin survived the inferno that fell on them. The protagonists of the film, former students at the Jewish Fürstenberg high school, are also among them. Lolek, for example, survived thanks to his blue eyes that made him not believed to be a Jew. Somebody tells of a young woman who gave lessons to the Jewish children who are no longer allowed to attend school in order to preserve some residual self-respect. Another tells of a resistance fighter who hid in the ghetto and helplessly had to watch the Jews being transported to the extermination camp. There is also talk of a high school student who was able to lead a carefree, happy life in the pre-war period thanks to the care of his parents, or of a couple who managed to flee to the Soviet Union in time but were immediately exiled there. It also tells of Pejsachson, who was shot while being transported to Auschwitz, after he spat in the face of a guard on duty and yelled at him: “You criminals! You will all die like dogs. "
The people now resident in Israel begin their journey into the past from there. Their stories bring to life the life they lived with their Polish fellow citizens before the war began. But the effects of the Nazi terror and the suffering suffered by the Jews become visible, including the extermination of the entire Jewish population of the small Polish town - victims of National Socialist racial madness .
production
Production notes, promotion
The film was produced by Halbtotal Filmproduktion GmbH & Co. KG (Wiesbaden) in co-production with Hessischer Rundfunk (Frankfurt am Main), with Ulrich Rydzewski Filmproduktion (Düsseldorf), with Appel Film (Warsaw) and Canal + Polska ( Warsaw). The film was first distributed by Basis-Film Verleih GmbH (Berlin).
Preface: “There is no immersion so deep that all traces could be destroyed, nothing human is so perfect; there are too many people in the world to make forgetting final. One will always stay to tell the story. ”- Hannah Arendt In: Eichmann in Jerusalem .
The film does not use photos, newsreels or other contemporary documents to illustrate the atrocities. Only the telling people immerse themselves in the past. Her stories make one aware of how painful her memory is for her even today. In retrospect it is also not forgotten that none of them wanted to admit what was going on at a time when the horror was already clearly emerging. The four survivors portrayed in the film found no words on certain topics, such as the encounter with the concentration camp doctor Josef Mengele , but fell silent.
Andrzej Klamt commented on his film: “[…] We met some of the survivors here, they came close to us, and they won our attention and sympathy. But in the background the photos also remind us of those who are no longer there. We see and listen to the living, but the dead are always present. For me, this remembrance is the most important thing about the film. ”In an interview about the film, Klamt said that the film's protagonists attended the same Jewish high school, then banished to the ghetto and finally deported to Auschwitz. They also have in common that they emigrated to Tel Aviv . They were chosen because they shared a common background in life and experience.
The film was funded by the Hessian Film Fund (Frankfurt am Main) and the Filmbüro Nordrhein-Westfalen eV (Mülheim). The film says: “This film was made thanks to the kind support of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum and the Fritz Bauer Institute Frankfurt am Main. We would like to thank the Sheraton Hotel in Tel Aviv for their kind support. "
publication
The film was released in theaters on November 9, 2000. The world premiere took place at the International Forum for New Cinema at the Berlinale 2000.
Basis DVD released the film on December 1, 2005 on DVD. A 24-page booklet is included with the DVD as a bonus.
reception
criticism
Eva-Maria Schirge wrote in the Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger : “You can't tell by looking at the burden that they carry within them. They look like normal elderly people who can look back on a more or less happy life. Only: they do not consider it normal that they are still alive. "
J. Jacoby praised in the Jewish weekly newspaper : "This film by Andrzej Klamt and Marek Pelc succeeded in what Spielberg and Co. tried in vain - to convey an idea of what and how Shoah survivors remembered."
On the filmladen.de website it is said that in Klamt's film we witness “how people struggle to 'acquire' their past. In the smile and in the sadness on their faces, in their loneliness, in sighing and encouraging themselves and in the resignation of their bodies when speaking ”a“ completely different historical drama is told than that written down by the historians: the drama of the many who cannot make sense of their story. And a different attitude than the excitement and sentiment that popular cinema generates "is" demanded of the viewer here ": He must" pause before the stories of the protagonists and question what he thought he knew so far ". He had to "open the armor that the media industry closed around him with its ready-made images of the Holocaust".
Christian Ziewer said that the way Klamt used the private photos, they should "not only help the interviewees" to "remember", but were also "a bridge to the viewer's own past". The “everyday situations, family, school, vacation, friendship and flirtation” are “familiar to the viewer as their own and make the people in the photos - as well as the survivors who are now sitting in front of them narrating - their neighbors : right next to him, right next door ”. So “the film wants to reverse what the terror regime did to these people next door when it stigmatized, disenfranchised and marginalized, first made strangers and then enemies. [...] ".
The explanations on the Film of the Month pages were that the storytelling by people is “the actual dramatic process of the film”: “How women and men sit and speak, how they falter and remain silent, how they move, how they do it think and try to remember how they reveal themselves. The way people remember is what this documentary documents above all else. ”In conclusion it says: Excuse me, I live seems a small film, limited in scope and horizon. But it opens up a cosmos of past and present that challenges the viewer because he confronts him with himself. We have to bear the thought that the past never passes. That we take them with us into the future.
Lars Meyer from Player Web spoke of a “cautious documentary that resists all tendencies towards infotainment”. It is beneficial that “a comment or additional historical recordings of the horrors of war, as they have long been used inflationarily on television”, are dispensed with and “simply relied on the memories-triggering power of the photographs”. The viewer listens to "the very individual and yet typical stories of a handful of people who were all born in Bedzin and now live in Tel Aviv".
The lexicon of international film also praised it: Without including the harrowing images of the extermination camps, the film bears testimony to Jewish life in the 20th century and convinces with its clear, linear structure. It is thanks to the protagonists that the film is not marked by bitterness, but that the desire for reconciliation flows into the memories of past suffering.
Prisma praised, “finally a film about the Holocaust that does not illustrate the cruel acts of horror, but only shows the survivors, listening to their stories and demonstrating their painstaking memory. So this film is a very personal view of history. "
Awards
- 2000: Andrzej Klamt receives the Hessian Film Prize
- 2000: Award from the jury of Protestant film work in the category "Film of the Month November 2000"
literature
- Bianca Herlo: Between Individual and Collective Memory: Remembering and Telling in Biographical Documentary , Edition Kulturwissenschaft, © 2018 transcript Verlag, Bielefeld, ISBN 978-3-8376-4344-2
Web links
- "... Excuse me, I live" in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- "... sorry, I'm alive" at filmportal.de
- "... I'm sorry , I'm alive" see page berlinale.de (PDF document)
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c I'm sorry, see page halbtotalfilm.de (including film excerpt). Retrieved June 13, 2019.
- ↑ Frank Noack: “I'm sorry, I'm alive”: Ada's singing see page tagesspiegel.de, November 20, 2000.
- ↑ a b c … excuse me, see page filmladen.de for life. Retrieved June 13, 2019.
- ↑ a b "... I'm sorry , I'm alive" see document filmdesmonats.de, pp. 4–6, 8. Accessed on June 13, 2019. (PDF document)
- ↑ "... sorry, I'm alive" / ... Przepraszam, ze zyje see page hagalil.com
- ↑ … Excuse me, see page basisdvd.de (including the picture of the DVD case)
- ↑ Lars Meyer: Excuse me, I live see page playerweb.de. Retrieved June 13, 2019.
- ↑ "... sorry, I'm alive". In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed June 13, 2019 .
- ↑ Sorry, I live see page prisma.de. Retrieved June 13, 2019.
- ↑ "... sorry, I'm alive" see page filmdesmonats.de (PDF document)