A Letter Without Words

In 1981, Lisa Lewenz discovered letters, diaries, and reel after reel of illegally shot 16mm that belonged to her grandmother, a German Jew living in Berlin during the Nazi era. Now she's turned it all into her own remarkable film, a granddaughter's ungarnished tribute to her grandmother, which doubles as a searing cut-and-paste window into wartime German Jewish ambivalence. We watch her family hide their Jewishness against shots of anti-Jewish street signs, we listen to her father struggle with the way he "reconstructed his life" to save his children, we feel the tension when they go to the New York World's Fair and not Auschwitz. Like the other home-movies-as-history or last-footage-before-the-catastrophe films in the festival (the often stunning, often dulling pre-war Hungarian collages of Free Fall; the overly quaint one-trick-pony Iowa Jew reports of Yidl in the Middle), Letter doesn't exactly know what to do with its material: how to narrate it, how to edit it, how to make it work as a film. But by the time Lewenz's cousin admits that he if he had ended up in the German army he probably would have followed orders too, you don't really care. At the Coolidge Corner, November 8 at 4:30 p.m.

A Letter Without Words
Human Remains
Rothschild's Violin
Amos Gutman, Filmmaker
Treyf
Florentene
Who's the Caboose?
Pop
Train of Life