World’s first Holocaust feature film to premiere in Tel Aviv this weekend

 

Wanda Jakubowska, “the grandmother of Polish cinema” as well as “the mother of Holocaust movies,” said the reason she lived through her imprisonment was because she was obsessed with making a film about it. (Image Courtesy: Haaretz).

As part of the Tel Aviv Polish Institute and the Polish Adam Mickiewicz Institute’s “Polish Zoom” film festival this month and next, Wanda Jakubowska’s The Last Stage (1947) is screening in Israel Sunday night seventy years after it debuted there, according to Haaretz. It is the first feature-length picture about the Holocaust, shot on location at Auschwitz, and the filmmaker, scriptwriter, and many cast members – all women – were camp survivors. As ahead of its time as the movie is with its intersectional feminism, though, it is still a Stalinist propaganda piece, sanitizing the Soviet war criminals into warriors of liberation.

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