The Ciesla Foundation is proud to announce that the new digitized version of Partisans of Vilna will be shown at the Arsenal Institute for Film and Video Art Collection in Berlin, among a series dedicated to the remembrance of the victims of National Socialism. I will be going to Berlin, where I was born, to present the film. Almost 30 years ago director Josh Waletzky and I premiered the film at the Berlin Film Festival.
-Aviva
Below is more information about the event:
PARTISANS OF VILNA
(directed by Josh Waletzky, USA 1986)
October 31
Potsdamer Straße 2, 10785 Berlin, Germany
7:00PM Cinema 1
Special Guest: Producer Aviva Kempner, in a discussion with Ulrich Gregor
The film is an account of armed resistance and internal struggles in the Vilna ghetto. Many of the Jewish partisans were students, who were young, well-educated and independent, and banded together with Russian, Polish and Lithuanian groups in the surrounding woods. Here too though, they experienced anti-Semitism and resentment. The film contains 40 interviews with former resistance fighters, as well as archive material from 1933–1944. Traditional songs and Yiddish interpretations of well-known partisan songs play an important role in the film.