AFTERMATH: HOW FILMMAKERS RESPONDED TO THE HOLOCAUST

International Holocaust Remembrance Day 2025 commemorates the 80^th anniversary of the liberation of Nazi concentration camps by Allied troops – the moment when the world became fully aware of the almost unimaginable scope of the genocide perpetrated within the camps under Nazism. Today, our image of that experience is largely shaped by the hundreds of dramatic films and television programs that tell stories set during the Holocaust – from Schindler’s List and Life Is Beautiful to Inglorious Basterds and Jakob the Liar – images and narratives created decades after the events they depict.

Far less known and little remembered are the much earlier fiction films that addressed the Holocaust, those made in the immediate aftermath of the war. Following the liberation of the camps, and even during the war itself, some filmmakers in Europe and the United States were already trying to tell the stories of Jews and other victims of Nazi persecution in dramatic ways. Most of these films were never publicly embraced, and some were later suppressed by the regimes under which they were made – but they represent the earliest narrative film attempts to depict, if not yet to understand, the enormity of the persecution and genocide.

In this talk illustrated with film clips, documentary filmmaker and programmer Peter L. Stein will discuss a number of films made between 1944-1949, in the immediate aftermath of the war, to consider the ways filmmakers working in the shadow of the Holocaust dramatized what their generation had just witnessed: how were they coming to terms with, or avoiding, what had taken place? These films include the prescient American drama None Shall Escape (1944); the stunning Polish resistance film The Last Stage—shot in 1947-8 on the grounds of Auschwitz and directed by Wanda Jakubowska, a former Auschwitz prisoner herself, who cast camp survivors to perform in the film; and the recently restored (and long suppressed) Czech melodrama Distant Journey, which daringly intercuts documentary footage with the fictional story of a Jewish woman sent to Terezin (Theresienstadt).

Peter L. Stein is a Peabody and Emmy Award-winning documentary maker and arts producer, creating nonfiction stories for television, theater, museums and online media. He served eight years as the Executive Director of the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, and for the last nine years as Senior Programmer for Frameline, the San Francisco International LGBTQ+ Film Festival. He maintains an active career as an onstage interviewer, presenter and performer. www.peterlstein.com

All seating is first come, first served.

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