From RefuseFascism.org:
IS IT FASCISM? (and what can we do about it?)
Two Films & Two Panels
Sunday May 6, Beverly Hills
Sunday May 6 • Noon to 6 pm
Laemmle’s Ahrya Fine Arts Theater
Tickets $15 • Info and Advance Sales:
https://www.laemmle.com/films/43859 or https://www.laemmle.com/films/27
This year, the Anne Frank Centre for Mutual Respect warned of “alarming parallels” between Donald Trump and Hitler, likening present-day US to the “escalating steps of oppression” that led to the Holocaust in the 1930s and 1940s. In that light, filmmaker David Zeiger and artist Perry Hoberman are launching a series of film screenings on the question facing Americans today: Is it Fascism? (and what can we do about it?)
The first screenings will be on Sunday, May 6, with the Academy Award nominated documentary Prisoner of Paradise, and The Mortal Storm, the MGM classic starring Jimmy Stewart and Margaret Sullavan that prompted Hitler to ban all MGM movies from Germany. Each screening will be followed by a panel discussion with presenters including Prisoner of Paradise co-director Stuart Sender, Jan-Christopher Horak, director of the UCLA Film and Television Archive, and journalist and author Robert Scheer.
Prisoner of Paradise, screening at noon, is a gripping 2002 Academy Award-nominated documentary, directed by Malcolm Clarke and Stuart Sender, that tells the story of Kurt Gerron, the most beloved Jewish actor in Weimar Germany, a star of caberet and film, who found himself making a famous Nazi propaganda film about the Thereisenstadt concentration camp…before he was transported to Auschwitz and killed, just days before the war ended. The film was nominated for the 2003 Academy Award as Best Feature Documentary. Clarke won the Directors Guild of Canada Award, and he and Sender were together nominated for the 2003 Directors Guild of America Award.
The Mortal Storm, screening at 3pm, is a 1940 drama from MGM, directed by Frank Borzage and starring Margaret Sullavan and James Stewart. The film examines the impact of fascism as it develops in Germany in the 1930s. One of the few anti-Nazi Hollywood films released before America’s entry into World War II, the film stars Jimmy Stewart as a German who refuses to join the rest of his small Bavarian town in supporting Nazism. Variety wrote “It is not the first of the anti-Nazi pictures, but it is the most effective film expose to date of the totalitarian idea, a slugging indictment of the political and social theories advanced by Hitler.
David Zeiger is an American film director and producer, perhaps best known for the documentary Sir! No Sir! (2005), the PBS series Senior Year (2002), Displaced in the New South (1996), and The Band (1998). He received a 2010 Guggenheim Fellowship for his debut narrative feature, Sweet Old World, which premiered in 2012 at the Atlanta Film Festival. Sir! No Sir! won the 2005 Los Angeles Film Festival Audience Award for Best Documentary, and went on to win Best Documentary at the Hamptons International Film Festival, the Seeds of War Award at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, and Best Film on War and Peace at the Vermont International Film Festival.
Perry Hoberman is a media artist, educator, inventor, activist and musician. Hoberman has exhibited internationally, with major shows throughout the USA and Europe, and has been the recipient of many awards and honors, including Guggenheim and Rockefeller Fellowships, as well as prizes from Prix Ars Electronic and the ICC Biennale. He has taught and lectured widely, with appointments at Cooper Union, San Francisco Art Institute, California Institute of the Arts, School of Visual Arts, and is currently an Associate Research Professor in the Division of Media Arts + Practice at the USC School of Cinematic Arts.
Contact
David Zeiger 213-595-1561 dzeiger@displacedfilms.com
Perry Hoberman 310-560-3526 perryhoberman@gmail.com |
