Screening of FORGOTTEN TRANSPORTS TO ESTONIA
A unique screening of the award-winning documentary followed by a discussion with the film maker Lukáš Přibyl.
| What |
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|---|---|
| When |
Mar 08, 2010 from 06:00 PM to 06:00 PM |
| Where | Male namesti 11, Richtruv dum, Prague 1 |
| Contact Name | Martina Faltova |
| Contact Email | martina@nyu.edu |
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Synopsis of the project
When the term “Holocaust documentary” in mentioned, most people tend to recall tattooed numbers on forearms,
footage of children in striped uniforms in Auschwitz, Hitler’s speeches or bulldozers pushing mountains of corpses.
Lukáš Přibyl’s four films of the Forgotten Transports series have none of that.
His movies document different “modes of survival” in extreme conditions, as told by men, women, families and
individuals deported to forgotten ghettos and camps in Latvia, Belarus, Estonia and Poland.
Almost all are aware of the existence of Theresienstadt or Auschwitz, but no one has heard about these “other” places.
The film heroes tell of their struggle for survival, about dramatic tales of love, the fate of people on the run or “normal life” in ghettos
with remarkable, life affirming humor and optimism. Absolute majority of them are telling their story for the very first time, and only after lengthy periods of persuasion.
The director (and political scientist and historian by training) Lukáš Přibyl documents every word of the witnesses
by painstakingly researched visual materials, found in Polish village houses, albums of former SS men and their lovers,
or film fragments selected in over 900 hours of footage perused in official archives.
The films contain no present-day and make-believe footage, only true, time and place precise images.
Each photograph is the result of a long search, dozens or even hundreds of phone calls and meetings.
There is also no narrator, no commentary, only the words of the witnesses.
Out of tens of thousands of Czech Jews deported to the forgotten places in the east, fewer than 300 survived.
Přibyl managed to find over seventy of them still alive and recorded 400 hours of interviews, in twenty countries on five continents.
The documentary series Forgotten Transports (4 x 90 minutes) is now ready to be presented to the viewers, after a decade of work.
For more info about the project: www.forgottentransports.com
