ISRAEL: Ruzowitzky's Oscar's award winning Holocaust-era film "The Counterfeiters" launched in Israel

Record ID: 395496

  • Title: ISRAEL: Ruzowitzky's Oscar's award winning Holocaust-era film "The Counterfeiters" launched in Israel
  • Date: 27th March 2008
  • Summary: AVRAHAM ZONENFELD, ONE OF THE COUNTERFEITERS, ENTERING AUDITORIUM, MEETING STEFAN RUZOWITZKY
  • Embargoed: 11th April 2008 13:00
  • Keywords:
  • Location: Israel
  • Country: Israel
  • Reuters ID: LVACGLY5QYZ3A7DUNGMNDMRDCNXQ
  • Story Text: Director of Oscar's best foreign film award "The Counterfeiters", Stefan Ruzowitzky, arrives in Jewish state to launch film on Austria's Holocaust-era.
    Director of Oscar's best foreign film award "The Counterfeiters", Stefan Ruzowitzky, launched the first screening in Israel on Tuesday (March 19).
    Ruzowitzky arrived in Israel with Adolf Berger, whose character of August Diehl is portrayed in the film based on his testimony from whose memoir the film is adapted.
    Ruzowitzky said he always wanted to make a film about Nazi issues as a grandchild of Nazi sympathizers and a citizen of a country grappling with its past.
    "I always wanted to make a movie about this subject being Austrian and this part of our country as well this is part of my family's history as well and I felt this particular story would give me the possibility to make both, have an interesting story make an accessible, suspenseful movie but also make have the possibility to make the necessary political statements," said Ruzowitzky ahead of the first screening in the Tel Aviv Museum of Art theatre.
    The movie about a group of Jews who produce counterfeit currency for the Nazis in a concentration camp in order to undermine the U.S. and British economies, beat out films from Israel, Kazakhstan, Poland and Russia.
    "Yes, sorry about that, I met Joseph Ceder (Director of "Beaufort" film nominated in Oscar's best foreign film category) and because we are sort of same generation I had some nice conversations with him but though I'm a guest here I am still happy that we won and not the...not "Beaufort"...I have to say," said Ruzowitzky.
    Berger who entered the auditorium to a big applause said he wrote the book to show the public that Nazis were murderers but also criminals.
    "What I wanted to produce, by writing the book, is the testimony and the declaration that the Nazis were not only murderers but were also top criminals that counterfeit a huge amount of money and by the success of the film I could bring my testimony to a large audience," said Berger showing a counterfeit bill.
    "They made millions and again millions but the millions of Jews that died in the Holocaust and were sent to the gas chambers," he added.
    Austria's Holocaust-era drama won the the country's first award in the category for best foreign language film.
    The film, based on real events, tells the story of a master Jewish counterfeiter, Salomon Sorowitsch, a pragmatist who puts his own survival first until the moral burden of helping the Nazi war effort becomes a burden too heavy to bear.
    The theme bears similarities to that of last year's foreign film Oscar winner "The Lives Of Others," a German picture about a man who spies for the Communist-era secret police but struggles to live with his conscience.
    Following the screening, Ruzowitzky, accompanied by a round of applause, told the audience that he depicted a different Holocaust phenomenon instead of the frequently visited topics, such as concentration camps and gas chambers.
    "Always people would say oh not just another Holocaust movie so I think it's necessary to come up with new interesting stories to invite people to be interested in these issues, which I think we all agree is necessary but not just again show what was a concentration camp like...will not be enough to attract new audiences," said Ruzowitzky.
    Israel's establishment in 1948 with international backing came after the arrival of hundreds of thousands of refugees and Holocaust survivors from Europe after World War Two.
    Avraham Zonenfeld, one of the counterfeiters living in Israel met Ruzowitzky for the first time and shared his thoughts on the film.
    "The movie is very good. There are..there were some points where I didn't exactly agree but I think everybody else won't feel this difference.
    The movie is not a documentary, the movie...it's a story movie so the director had all the right to put in these changes, which he thought would be more interesting for the public," said Zonenfeld.
    Zonenfeld emphasized that the purpose of Jews working in the counterfeit factory had one goal - to survive.

    "Our problem was to survive not to help the Americans or the English by striking the war. We wanted...our main problem was how to live, that's why we tried to work not to bad and not too good," said Zonenfeld.
    Baruch Schmidt was among the many spectators who approached the director after the screening to praise him for what Schmidt called a "work of art".

    "It was a work of art and this is what I mean by a work of art when you ...when it's finished you are numb. You don't...you are not thinking, you feel that you have experienced something, you are now aware of things, important things, that you couldn't be aware of any other way and it stays with you," said Schmidt.
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