TRIBECA FILM FESTIVAL 2015 // A FILM REVIEW OF "A NAZI LEGACY: WHAT OUR FATHER'S DID"
The 2015 Tribeca Film Festival, presented by AT&T, runs April 15th-26th and features hundreds of features, documentaries, short films, and special events all throughout downtown New York City. The ArtsWire Weekly's three featured reviewers Mateo, Derek, & Chrisena are hitting the festival and bringing the reviews right to you! What you should see and what you should skip...
It's halfway through the film A NAZI LEGACY: WHAT OUR FATHERS DID and I'm in tears for the third (more realistically fifth) time since the start of TRIBECA Film Festival. Three men stand in front of a monument that is surrounded by tall tangles of grass and weeds. None of them will raise their eyes off of the ground, and none seem to currently have the ability to talk. The monument resides in Poland on the outskirts of a town where hundreds of Jews were slaughtered and dropped into mass graves and then abandoned. The present day men all come from very different backgrounds. The youngest, is our film's narrator, Philippe Sands, whose ancestors perished in this meadow. The eldest two are older men now, just barely alive during the war. The first is Horst von Wachter, whose father was Otto Von Wachter. The next is Niklas Frank, the son of Hans Frank who was the Butcher of Poland.
The film begins the same way most visits to a grandparent might. Sands meets each gentleman one on one to look through photo albums and sift through hand written letters. The reminiscing usually ends with a walking tour of each older man's childhood home. The interviews are polite and respectful, but the subject matter is tricky. How can you ask about being raised by a monster in a polite way?
Somehow, Sands pulls off the initial interviews with calmness and distance. Then we see that each man had very different relationships with their fathers. Where Horst fondly remembers summers at the lake with his entire family, and how much his father loved his family, Niklas remembers his father as a horribly cruel and cold man, who never acknowledged his presence. Perhaps this is part of the reason why Horst cannot accept that his father, a high ranking Nazi official, was responsible for any of the evil deeds for which he is accused.
Sands quickly turns from polite and passive to determined and aggressive. He shows Horst documents that his father signed condemning Jews to their fates. Niklas reads a chilling speech his father gave to the Nazi party that jokingly asks Horst's father what he did with all of the Jews, "nothing nasty I hope". It still isn’t enough to convince Horst. He cannot see past the living father he knew as a child.
The film constantly tries to prove to Horst that his father was not innocent of these war crimes but actively guilty in murdering Polish Jews. It is difficult to watch this old man struggle with his ideas of his father as he is presented with all of the facts. The worst part of the story however, is that Niklas goes very far in the opposite direction, taking all of the guilt and burden his father left behind. This man can't remember a single good thing about his father, and even says that he feels ashamed to be his son. While it is understandable, it is difficult to watch a person who was an innocent child at the time of war, feel all the guilt for crimes he didn’t even understand at the time.
The film leaves me wondering which man I pity the most. The one who cannot accept the evils his father committed or the man who had a monster of a father, and who has no happy memories to speak of. This is an interesting and emotional voice on a subject that I had never stopped to ponder. What happened to the children of the Nazi leaders? But now the questions has been answered.
VERDICT: SEE IT
DIRECTED BY David Evans WRITTEN BY Philippe Sands FEATURING Philippe Sands, Niklas Frank, Horst von Wachter
Playing as part of The 2015 Tribeca International Film Festival. For tickets & schedules: http://www.tribecafilm.com
CHRISENA RICCI once went to a costume party dressed in an all black dress and black wig. No one there could guess who she was. So she shouted out, "I'm Christina Ricci, without the T or I and add an E!" Everyone stood there confused, she was annoyed, so she stormed off. She never returned to that apartment ever again. Which is fine, because she later realized she was at the wrong party. She now lives in New York City.