VARIOUS: ONE WEEK AFTER WORLD FILM PREMIERE AT TORONTO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL, NEW FILM "JAKOB THE LIAR" TAKES A BOW IN NEW YORK

Record ID: 388121

  • Title: VARIOUS: ONE WEEK AFTER WORLD FILM PREMIERE AT TORONTO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL, NEW FILM "JAKOB THE LIAR" TAKES A BOW IN NEW YORK
  • Date: 28th September 1999
  • Summary: TORONTO, ONTARIO, CANADA (SEPTEMBER 15) (RTV-LA) (SOUNDBITE) (ENGLISH) ROBIN WILLIAMS SAYING OF THE LOCATIONS It's not a set. It's basically a state of mind at that point because you're in a place where it happened and it is very strange, I met, they had a screening in London where a survivor of that ghetto was there. It's a very, I mean, to meet someone from that place i
  • Embargoed: 13th October 1999 13:00
  • Keywords:
  • Location: TORONTO, ONTARIO, CANADA AND VARIOUS FILM LOCATIONS
  • Country: USA
  • Reuters ID: LVA7CUSJ6UMG8P9SIMUV9XR8MSGP
  • Story Text: One week after it celebrated its World Premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, the new Holocaust-era dramatic comedy "Jakob the Liar" took a bow in New York on Wednesday, September 22 as Robin Williams attended its American premiere.
    The film is being seen as a not-so-distant American cousin to Roberto Benigni's Oscar winning hit "Life is Beautiful" because both films are stories of ordinary men who use their imagination and humour to give hope to the hopeless victims of the Holocaust.
    "Jakob the Liar" differs in that the film is set entirely inside a hellish Nazi-occupied Polish Jewish ghetto in 1944, while Benigni's film took place both before the war and inside a concentration camp.
    Williams plays Jakob, the owner of a long-closed cafe in the Jewish ghetto, who accidentally overhears a forbidden radio news bulletin about Soviet military successes against the Germans.As the news spreads, so does the rumour that Jakob must have a radio, an offense punishable by death.
    Despite the danger, Jakob continues to relay fictious news bulletins about Allied advances against the Nazis.These lies keep hope and humour alive among the Jews of the ghetto and bring the suicide rate to a standstill.
    Based on the book by Polish author Jurek Becker, who spent most of his early years in the Lodz ghetto and concentration camps, the film is directed by Hungarian filmmaker Peter Kassovitz, whose parents both survived the Nazi death camps and returned to their native Budapest after the war.
    Serving as producer on the film is Williams' real-life wife Marsha Garces Williams.This is the third film to come out of her Blue Moon Productions Company, the first two being the hits "Mrs.Doubtfire" and "Patch Adams."
    Also in the cast as fellow members of the ghetto are Liev Schrieber, most recently seen in "Sphere" with Dustin Hoffman and "Ransom" with Mel Gibson, Alan Arkin, Bob Balaban, "Shine"
    co-star and Oscar nominee Armin Mueller-Stahl and Williams' "Fisher King" co-star Michael Jeter.
    For the cast, the Polish and Hungarian locations provided an unavoidable reminder of the horror of the Holocaust.They shot much of the film in the Polish town of Piotrkow, the location of the very first Jewish ghetto in Poland.In 1944, the year in which the film takes place, the town had a Jewish community of 200 thousand, today there are fewer than 100 Jewish residents.
    Scenes depicting the ghetto population being removed from the ghetto employed 400 local extras, all dressed in their tattered wardrobe, each emblazoned with the six pointed yellow star.Fifty-five years earlier during that very same week, two thousand Piotrkow Jews were liquidated by Nazi troops from that exact square.
    The crew also shot in Budapest, at the site of the Budapest ghetto, just down the street from the former office of Adolf Eichmann, Chief of the Jewish Office of the Gestapo during the war who implemented the "Final Solution."
    "Jakob the Liar" had it's World Premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 16 and opens in cinemas throughout the United States on Friday, September 24.
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