The Eighty-First Blow, Flames in the Ashes, The Last Sea

The Eighty-First Blow
Ha-Makah Hashmonim V'Echad
Israel, 1975, 91 minutes
(originally 115 minutes), B&W
Hebrew and Yiddish with English subtitles
Directed by David Bergman

Public Performance 16mm Rental Only

AWARDS

BEST DOCUMENTARY NOMINATION Academy Awards 1975

This is the first documentary of this trilogy produced under the auspices of the Israeli Ghetto Fighters' House' (Beit Lohamei Haghetaot), a kibbutz-based organization of Holocaust survivors dedicated to preserving the history of Jewish resistance and the memory of those who fell victim to the Nazis. Written by Israeli soldier, poet and journalist Haim Gouri, the trilogy constitutes one of the most ambitious attempts at a comprehensive film history of the Holocaust.

This Academy Award-nominated film is drawn mainly from Nazi film footage and Jewish eyewitness testimony (much of the latter given at the Eichmann Trial.) The film opens with a montage of scenes of workaday Jewish life in pre-Hitler Eastern Europe, then describes the rise of Nazism in Germany, the German occupation of Poland, the various stages of the "Final Solution," and instances of Jewish resistance.

CRITICAL ACCLAIM

"... a rare event... powerful and moving, using art to advance the causes of humanity and justice... to raise the level of moral judgment among its viewers."
-Wall Street Journal, May 7, 1975

"... a mosaic that cuts deep into the living flesh. This is an authentic testimony of the Holocaust, of barbarism and the degradation of humanity, a shattering document that cannot be expressed in words, a metaphysical experience, an apocalyptic nightmare that leaves the spectator numb and speechless..."
- Ma'ariv, September 10, 1974

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The Last Sea
Ha-Yam Ha'Aharon
Israel, 1979, 68 minutes, B&W
Hebrew with English subtitles or dubbed English
Directed by Daniel Bergman, Jacquot Erlich, Haim Gouri, Benny Shilo

Public Performance 16mm Rental Only

AWARDS

SILVER EAGLE International Festival of Historic Films, 1983

In 1945, multitudes of liberated survivors of the death camps, finding themselves homeless in Europe, sought to immigrate to Israel. This film recounts the survivors' journeys, including their danger-fraught passages through the borders of Europe and across the Mediterranean, confrontations with the British Navy, detention at camps on Cyprus, and their final, vindicating arrival in the land of their forefathers.

The second in this epic trilogy of Israeli documentaries about the Holocaust and its aftermath, this film was edited together from over 30 hours of archival footage; in lieu of narration. These visuals are accompanied by the anonymous testimonials of witnesses, forming what the film's makers call "a historic poem."

CRITICAL ACCLAIM

"I have no hesitation in recommending this film for its documentary quality as well as its historical value as I watched, it took my breath away."
Elie Wiesel

" [The film's] uninterrupted, barely mediated flow of voices and images has a visionary immediacy"
J. Hoberman, The Village Voice, July 10, 1984

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Flames in the Ashes
Pnei Hamered
Israel, 1985, 90 minutes, B&W
Yiddish and Hebrew with English subtitles
Directed by Haim Gouri and Jacquot Erlich

Public Performance 16mm Rental Only

"Who is more heroic, one who goes in the woods to fight with a gun or one who decides to go that last road and die with his family?" This film, the third in a trilogy examines Jewish resistance during World War II. Against a background of archival film footage and still photographs, the voices of 120 survivors tell their stories, which include first-hand accounts of Sobibor and the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

CRITICAL ACCLAIM

"The film is especially successful in bringing home the human cost of this unimaginable horror turning the faceless, numberless victims into neighbors, relatives and friends."
Janet Maslin, The New York Times, September 2, 1987

"The film has a quiet and profound strength, an extraordinary voice that rises above what we see and hear. It resonates with power and the spirit of redemption an enduring legacy of Jewish resistance that will touch every viewer."
F.E. Siegel, New York City Tribune, September 2, 1987

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