Karry Best movie of this year hands down!

UnowPriceless hyped garbage

Doomtomylo a film so unique, intoxicating and bizarre that it not only demands another viewing, but is also forgivable as a satirical comedy where the jokes eventually take the back seat.

Allison Davies The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

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.

ematerso I had never heard of this film as we don't get many documentaries in our area and if it was shown at a Jewish film festival, it would have eluded me. Although this is a documentary focused on the holocaust, primarily whet I took away; is that there are people who want to be realists and deal with the truths of their own and the lives of others and there are those who live lives of denial. It is my opinion that the second type of people actually endanger not only themselves but those they may love very much.I knew people who themselves had been in camps or were the children of those who had been, but I had never stopped to consider the "lapping" over of lives of those who had been persecutors and persecuted. And of course there must be many such instances of this.Many people on the message boards have criticized Aron Goldfinger for confronting the daughter, Edda, of the Von Mildensteins. But why should he not have done so? She said her father was traveling in Japan during the war, but did his grandparents receive any letters from his travels then? I was sort of disgusted with both husband and wife in that situation. that the camps had been Russian and American propaganda, I am roughly the same age as Hannah and Edda and believe me I would have known if all the Jewish children in my school had disappeared. What do they think happened to those people. Where are all the other Arons that should have populated Germany? They never got born because there parents died in the camps.Through one of those odd twists of fate I became involved in a correspondence with a woman whose parents had been very prominent in Hitlar's Nazi Germany. When it was found that one of the couple were not completely Aryan they had to leave Germany and settled with their large family in the town I now live in. When I first heard from one of these children I did research in the newspaper archives here, and like Edda my correspondent was very desirous of explaining away her parents involvement in events that took place in Germany.We here in the United States are supposed to continue to feel guilty about the fact that this country once allowed slavery. No one alive today owned a slave here, and many are descended from people who did not even live in America during slave owning years. But there are many in Germany who lived though those years of 1930 and 1940 and who claim to have no knowledge of anything unpleasant that happened, except to themselves. As we learn Edda and her husband had spent many years living in England.My husband and I are both very pleased that we saw this wonderful documentary and we both liked Aron very much.

Larry Silverstein I found this documentary, written, directed, and narrated by Arnon Goldfinger, to be quite fascinating as it unravels like a detective story.When Arnon's grandmother Gerda Tuchler passes away in Tel Aviv, at the age of 98, Arnon and other family members, including his mother Hannah, converge on Gerda's apartment to help sort out its' contents. However when Arnon comes across an article from the 1930's, in the German newspaper Der Angriff ( a notorious Nazi propaganda publication), it opens up a Pandora's Box of questions and eventual investigations.Gerda and her husband Kurt Tuchler were living in Germany at the time, but they are shown in this article visiting Palestine with a known SS officer Leopold von Mildenstein and his wife. Further investigation by Arnon revealed letters and photos of a friendship between the Tuchlers and von Mildensteins which continued, after the Tuchler's migration to Palestine, during WW2 itself, and amazingly even after the war.One of the fascinating aspects of the film is that every time Arnon tried to find an answer to the past, new and vital avenues of inquiry would arise. It would take way too much space to document all that Arnon uncovered in the movie. However, I will say there were many surprises along the way which kept me quite riveted.Was von Mildenstein actually working with the notorious Nazis Eichmann and Goebbels, or had he left Germany on a world tour as his daughter Edda believed? Even after the war, did von Mildenstein work as a Coca-Cola executive despite the fact that his name was prominently mentioned by Eichmann at his trial? Was Arnon's great grandmother Susanne Lehmann sent to a concentration camp and murdered by the Nazis? If so, why wasn't he or any member of his family told about it?Crucial questions like these are attempted to be answered by Arnon, and as mentioned it all adds up to a riveting story where one layer after another is peeled off. I thought Goldfinger did an outstanding job, in his low key manner, of putting the pieces of this puzzle together in this exceptional movie.

Marta "The Flat" is a great documentary that leaves a lot of questions unanswered, which is as it should be. There are really no good answers for what unfolds over the next 97 minutes. Through the course of the film director Arnon Goldfinger tries to find out his family's recent past, in both Germany and Palestine, something that had never been discussed until after his grandmother died. The documentary confronts the messy business of life, and how people deal with family scandal and buried secrets. A war generation, both German and Jewish, forgets their past on purpose, the next generation is not encouraged to question their elders about it, and the third generation wonders why the two that went before could so conveniently ignore their own, and their parents, history. Goldfinger does a good job of laying out how all the participants in this documentary handle, or don't handle, their part in the story. It's a quiet film that is shadowed by immense subjects. As the viewer, we are left to wonder just how much we understand of our own family and its history, and if we have denied parts of our own past just as conveniently as some of the participants in this documentary have.It's a human story, in the end. Humans do terrible things and justify them in ways those of us who come after might find callous and chilling. Goldfinger cannot interview any of the original participants in this story, since they are all dead; some of natural causes, some in the Holocaust. The final scenes are just as void of answers as the rest of the film. Goldfinger and his mother look for her grandfather's grave in Berlin, in an old Jewish cemetery, during a driving rainstorm. They look in vain for any sign of their family member in this overgrown graveyard, but can find none. Both say they were not prepared for not finding the grave, as if it now suddenly is of the utmost importance that they find some link with their past, after so many years of silence on the subject. That's a good sign, because it might mean they will continue to confront the hard answers and keep up the search for their history, but as the viewer you weep, just the same, for all the love and knowledge that has been lost to time and death. We don't ever get that back.