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Eye on the Oscars: Holocaust Film Makes the Shortlist
HEROINE: A documentary about Hannah Senesh is a contender for an Oscar nomination.unprintable innuendo about the and 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer.'
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More in The ShmoozeAdocumentary about murdered Jewish poet and paratrooper Hannah Senesh has been shortlisted for an Oscar nomination.
“Blessed Is the Match: The Life and Death of Hannah Senesh” is among 15 films still in contention for a best documentary nomination at next year’s Academy Awards, with the final five to be announced January 22.
“Blessed Is the Match,” the first feature-length documentary about the Holocaust heroine, includes interviews with British historian Martin Gilbert and Israeli President Shimon Peres as it tells the story of its subject, who was captured and killed by the Nazis after parachuting into her native Hungary in a military attempt under the British Armed Forces to rescue Jews during the genocide. Produced with unprecedented access to the Senesh family archives, “Blessed Is the Match” makes use of Hannah Senesh’s poetry, diary and personal correspondence as it examines her immigration to pre-state Israel and her daring, ill-fated rescue operation in Nazi Europe. Joan Allen, a three-time Oscar nominee for such movies as “Nixon” and “The Crucible,” narrates the film, a project that follows her work as narrator for “The Rape of Europa,” a 2006 documentary about the mass theft of Jewish-owned art during the Holocaust.
Other documentaries shortlisted for next year’s Oscars include “Standard Operating Procedure,” Errol Morris’s look at America’s treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, and “Trouble the Water,” about Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath.
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In 1982, the Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg, summarized his thesis before an audience of nearly 2,700 at Avery Fischer Hall in New York City: the entire German policy for the physical destruction of the Jews was to be explained by mind reading! No document attesting to this criminal policy could be found, because no such document existed. For several years, the entire German bureaucratic machinery operated through a kind of telepathy.
As Hilberg put it: "But what began in 1941 was a process of destruction not planned in advance, not organized centrally by any agency. There was no blueprint and there was no budget for destructive measures. They [these measures] were taken step by step, one step at a time. Thus came about not so much a plan being carried out, but an incredible meeting of minds, a consensus -- mind reading by a far-flung bureaucracy."
Let me note again those final words: "an incredible meeting of minds, a consensus -- mind reading by a far-flung bureaucracy." AMAZING!