Intcatinfo
A Masterpiece!
InformationRap
This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.
Staci Frederick
Blistering performances.
B Heller
This movie is about the emotional and historical journey taken by Arnon Goldfinger, a filmmaker, as he explores his grandmother's life based on artifacts he finds among her possessions after her death and interviews with people outside the family. Goldfinger's grandparents left Germany in 1936 for Palestine.As the daughter of someone who was similarly expelled from Germany by the Nazis, this movie resonated deeply. The silences, secrets and omissions in the family's communications about themselves and their history are very familiar. Goldfinger does an excellent job of revealing the sadness and confusion created when painful truths are revealed.The movie centers on Goldfinger's great-grandmother Susi, his grandmother Gerda, and his mother Hannah. Matralineality is recognized by the Jewish faith as the means by which Judiasm is conferred on offspring. In this sense, the women are the keepers of the faith. For Goldfinger's family, Gerda did not, or could not, sustain the powerful emotional family life that she knew in Germany. Her daughter Hannah was almost completely ignorant of her grandmother Susi's existence and had a relationship with Gerda that was not particularly close. When Hannah discovers Susi's letters among Gerda's effects, letters that proclaim love for Hannah and fervent hopes for Hannah's safe future, Hannah shrugs and claims she knew nothing about it. This is a profound emotional loss for Hannah, even though she fails to recognize it. Arnon's relationship with his mother Hannah is similarly not particularly close. In the end, this is the movie's most powerful message: how the Holocaust destroyed much more than the millions of lives terminated. Through the thread of the plot that traces the history of a highly ranked Nazi whom Goldfinger's grandparents befriended, it is also clear that the Germans were never held fully accountable for their crimes.Congratulations to Arnon Goldfinger for having the courage to explore the past, no matter where it led.
Satyajit Roychaudhury
What I never understood was how the holocaust could have happened in a country that had excelled in philosophic thoughts, music and literature. I have seen many films related to the holocaust. I have even visited Auschwitz. I never thought I would see a film like this on the subject. The film was very sensitively produced and seemed very honest to the content. What is fascinating is that the characters were all real. Like a documentary. Yet the film had a story that flowed. I would certainly see it again to fill the gaps that I may have missed. What I would also like to find out is the reaction to this film in Israel and Germany.
Red-125
The Flat (2011) is an Israeli movie, written and directed by Arnon Goldfinger. It's an unusual film, because I believe that the filmmaker truly didn't know how the movie would end when he started filming.Arnon Goldfinger's grandmother died in Tel Aviv at age 98. He and his family had the task of cleaning out the apartment in which his grandparents had lived since the 1930's. The family members were shocked to learn of their grandparents' close friendship with a German family, the von Mildersteins. This friendship had begun before WW II, but had endured the war, and had been re-established after the war.Goldfinger pursues the question of how his Jewish grandparents could have stayed in such close touch with a Nazi couple. Why did they do this? The director tracks down the daughter of the von Mildersteins, who welcomes them to her home in Germany. The daughter was well aware of the friendship, and apparently the friendship didn't strike her as strange.The director then digs deeper into the facts related to von Milderstein. Was he "just a journalist," as his daughter believes, or was he much more? (The facts about von Milderstein are now available in the archives from the former East Germany.) We can only speculate about the explanation for how the friendship could continue for so long. This is especially puzzling, because Goldfinger's maternal great-grandmother (his grandmother's mother) had been killed by the Nazis. Goldfinger interviews an expert in post-Holocaust Jewry. The expert offers what I thought was a good explanation for the psychology of Jews who retained their ties to Germany and to Germans after the war. That answer is probably the best that the director--or we as viewers--are going to get. It explains behavior that would otherwise be inexplicable.This is definitely a film you want to seek out if you are interested in post-Holocaust behavior. It's also informative to watch von Milderstein's daughter deal with the new information that Goldfinger has uncovered.We saw this movie in the Rochester Jewish Community Center as part of the outstanding Rochester Jewish Film Festival. However, it should work very well on DVD. After you see it, you'll keep thinking about it. I recommend it.
dromasca
Arnon Goldfinger's most recent documentary The Flat (best documentary awards at the Jerusalem and Haifa film festivals) starts as a typical family story. A few weeks after the director's grandmother dies the family starts looking into the things accumulated in her Tel Aviv flat. The apartment is full of objects gathered through a full life, and as it gradually empties and light starts penetrating the shady corners, details from a hidden past start to emerge. As many other immigrants coming from Europe Gerda and Kurt Tuchler had gathered not only things from a past time and an old country, but also photos and documents of a life that brought them from the Berlin between the two wars to Palestine which was to become the State of Israel. Soon we learn that the Tuchlers seemed to be the kind of immigrants who kept not only memories and nostalgia, but a strong attraction and relationship with the old country. An intriguing story completely unknown to the third generation starts to uncover from the drawers and boxes left in the flat – photos, letters, newspapers from Nazi Germany and one of the strangest coins that ever existed, with a Magen David on one side and a swastika on the other. The Tuchlers were friends with a family of high Nazi dignitaries named von Mildenstein, they traveled with them to Palestine after the Nazis came to power and before settling here definitively, and the trip was described in details by Leopold von Mildenstein in the German press of the time under the title 'A Nazi travels to Palestine'. Despite the fact that the story was researched and mentioned in the German and Israeli press after the war, the family knows close to nothing about it. The film describes the process of gradual discovery which is not void of surprises, as they soon learn that the Tuchlers and the Mildensteins continued their friendly relations after the war, despite the fact that von Mildenstein seemed to have been quite an important figure in the Nazi regime, and related to the fate of the Jews (he was the one who recruited Eichman and preceded him in the position of responsible of the Jewish affairs). How much the Tuchlers knew about the activities of their German friend during the war and what these really were remains in part a mystery.The film focuses on the process of gradual discovery which is for the author-director a trip in the past of his own family, a trip which will take him to Germany, to Berlin where he discovers remote relatives still living in the same area where his grandparents lived and to a series of meetings with the daughter of the Mildensteins. Dialogs between German and Jewish families who lived through the war and between their descendants are never easy, and they say a lot about how people who lived through the period relate to history, how they cope with the horrors of the war and of the Holocaust and how they passed these feelings to the coming generations. A strong similarity soon emerges, as in both families, the German one and the Jewish one, the same rule of silence seems to have been enforced, the past was kept secret and almost nothing told to the next generation. The children were raised not to ask questions, and their lives were completely disconnected from the history of their families. During Goldfinger's inquiry and film making both families are up for painful revelations and none of the second generation is really prepared to cope with role played by the high German functionary in the Nazi regime, or with the fate of the Jewish grand-grandmother left behind in Berlin and murdered in the Holocaust. It is the third generation (of the director) who is destined to ask the questions and get part of the answers. The mystery of the Tuchlers is not fully revealed and will probably never be completely. In one of the final scenes of the film the director and his mother are looking under a pouring rain for the grave of the grand-grandfather in a Jewish cemetery in Berlin. They cannot find it, the place where it should be is covered by vegetation. The physical link with the past has completely vanished. The spiritual link of the old generation who could not tear themselves from the cultural and mentality relation with the old Europe even after the horrors of the Holocaust is the troubling secret investigated and revealed in part by this documentary.
