Judisk Kultur

WHO WILL WRITE OUR HISTORY

Film & samtal

Meet Nancy Spielberg, executive producer

Roberta Grossman, producer, writer and director

Thursday, Nov. 7 at 18:00

Konstakademien, hörsalen

Med efterföljande mingel med vin och tilltugg

DN's artikel om kvällens program: 

https://www.dn.se/kultur-noje/ny-film-ger-ett-unikt-dokument-om-nazisternas-brott/

ABOUT THE FILM

In November 1940, days after the Nazis sealed 450,000 Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto, a secret band of journalists, scholars, and community leaders decided to fight back. Led by historian Emanuel Ringelblum and known by the code name Oyneg Shabes, this clandestine group vowed to defeat Nazi lies and propaganda not with guns or fists but with pen and paper. They detailed life in the Ghetto from the Jewish perspective. They commissioned diaries, essays, jokes, poems, and songs. They documented Nazi atrocities with eyewitness accounts. They sent reports of mass murder to London via the Polish underground. Then, as trains deported them to the gas chambers of Treblinka and the Ghetto burned to the ground, they buried 60,000 pages of documentation in the hopes that the archive would survive the war, even if they did not.

Now, for the first time, the story of Emanuel Ringelblum and the Oyneg Shabes archive is told as a feature documentary. Written, produced, and directed by Roberta Grossman and executive produced by Nancy Spielberg, Who Will Write Our History mixes the writings of the archive with new interviews, rarely seen footage, and stunning dramatizations to transport us inside the Ghetto and the lives of these courageous resistance fighters. Featuring the voices of three-time Academy Award® nominee Joan Allen and Academy Award® winner Adrien Brody, the film honors the Oyneg Shabes members’ determination in creating the most important cache of eyewitness accounts to survive the war. It follows their moments of hope, as well as their despair, desperation and anger, sometimes at their fellow Jews as much as their Nazi captors. It captures their humor, longing, hunger, and determination to retain their humanity in the face of unspeakable hardships. Ultimately, through their voices, actions, and real-time experiences, Who Will Write Our History vanquishes those who distort and dehumanize the “Other” in favor of those who stand up, fight back and, as one Oyneg Shabes member writes, “scream the truth to the world.”

NANCY SPIELBERG – EXECUTIVE PRODUCER

Producer Nancy Spielberg grew up immersed in filmmaking, working on her brother’s early films as cast and crew. She attended Arizona State University and UCLA and, after moving to New York in 1978, studied film at Sarah Lawrence College and the New School. An accomplished businesswoman and philanthropist, she has turned her energy and talents to producing documentary and feature films. One of her priorities is to help preserve stories and make them into educational tools for the benefit of younger generations.

Ms. Spielberg served as consultant on the Oscar-winning documentary, Chernobyl Heart, and is executive producer of Elusive Justice: The Search for Nazi War Criminals, which aired nationally on PBS. Most recently, she produced Above and Beyond, winner of the audience award at more than twenty film festivals. Spielberg is the executive producer of Sophie Sartain’s documentary, Mimi and Dona, which was broadcast nationally on PBS in late 2015. She is executive producer of Who Will Write Our History, which tells the story of the secret buried archive of the Warsaw Ghetto, and of On the Map, a documentary by filmmaker Dani Menkin, which, since its 2016 release, has been screening all over the world and has received multiple festival awards.

ROBERTA GROSSMAN – WRITER; PRODUCER, DIRECTOR

An award-winning filmmaker with a passion for history and social justice, Roberta Grossman has written, directed, and produced more than 40 hours of film and television. What sets her films apart are high production values, beautiful cinematic craftsmanship and inspiring protagonists. Grossman’s films tell stories of ordinary people doing extraordinary things in the name of justice. According to Grossman, “making a documentary is like pushing Sisyphus’ rock up a steep mountain. The only way to summit is to have a sense of personal responsibility to tell a story that would otherwise remain untold.”

Grossman wrote, produced, and directed Who Will Write Our History, about Emanuel Ringelblum and the secret archive of the Warsaw Ghetto, co-produced by Arte and NDR. Also in 2018, Grossman co-directed and produced the Netflix Original Documentary Seeing Allred, about women’s rights attorney Gloria Allred. Seeing Allred premiered in competition at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival and was described as “remarkably engaging (The New York Times), “utterly fascinating” (CNET) and “the perfect companion to the #MeToo movement (Variety). Grossman is currently producing All This Life: The Many Worlds of Roman Vishniac.

https://whowillwriteourhistory.com/press-kit/

I samarbete med Historiska museet och Konstakademien.