Thirty Great Movies You've Probably Never Seen: Ingelore

 

 

Year:   2009

Director:  Frank Steifel

I am trying to cover as many different kinds of films in this survey as I possibly can.  I’ve done one short animated film (http://hubpages.com/hub/Thirty-Great-Movies-Youve-Probably-Not-Seen--The-Mysterious-Geographical-Explorations-of-Jasper-Morello), but I have yet to do a short documentary film.

Let’s correct that omission now.  The International Documentary Association is currently holding their annual Docuweeks festival in New York and Los Angeles.  As an absolute lover of documentaries I’m doubly lucky as not only do I live in L.A., but the IDA is holding the screenings at The Arclight Hollywood, which is the best movie theater in the city.

The festival is showing both feature-length documentaries and shorts.  On Sunday I went to one of the shorts programs.  And I saw an extraordinary 26 minute movie called Ingelore.

Ingelore Herz Honigstein is a deaf woman who was born in 1924 to Jewish parents in Kuppenheim, Germany.  Her parents were embarrassed by their “damaged” child and didn’t have the ability to deal with her. 

Ignored by her parents, she didn’t speak her first word until she was six years old.  She didn’t utter a complete sentence out loud until she was twelve years old. 

Finally she was sent to a series of schools, and eventually ended up at a boarding school for the deaf in Berlin.  She was there when during the notorious Kristallnact, or The Night of Broken Glass, a two-day attack on Jewish-owned homes and business that occurred across Germany and Austria on November 9-10, 1938.  As a Jew herself, she was thrown out of school and sent home.

The movie is narrated by the 84-year old Ingelore herself, who appears throughout the film.  She is a delightful person, full of humor and energy.  She literally seems to glow with life.  Her English is good, but like many deaf people, speech isn’t effortless for her so her words are chosen very deliberately and her narrative therefore ends up having a lot of clarity and power.

She describes returning back to her home in Kuppenheim after being thrown out of school.  She didn’t understand what “Jewish” was, or why it made her different.  “What is a Jew?” she demanded of her mother.  “Explain it to me!!”

To her the rise of the Nazis were just another baffling part of a hostile world that rendered her a ball of anger and fear.

Ingelore goes on describe even more harrowing experiences. She’s remarkably candid and direct, retelling events which could be considered highly embarrassing and personal.

I want to stress that this isn’t another Upsetting Holocaust Movie.  Because the woman is such a plucky survivor, the movie actually becomes inspiring and even empowering. 

The whole point of this Thirty Day Hub Challenge for me is to recommend thirty great movies for you to see, and with Ingelore that presents a problem, as it’s just now in extremely limited release.  What’s more, it’s in a format (short documentary) that most moviegoers never seek out.

Therefore, I’m challenging you to write this title down on your To Do Movie List.  And if you don’t have one, start one now!  (I use the handy Outlook Notes feature for this kind of thing.)  Eventually this movie will be available on demand on line, or from Netflix, or on cable, or otherwise on DVD.  You want to see this movie.

Footnote:  I got to meet Ingelore!  A couple of days after I saw the movie, I was back at the Arclight seeing another documentary in the series (Smile ‘Til It Hurts:  The Up With People Story) and as I was walking out of the theater, there she was!  I trotted up to her and told her how much I loved her beautiful movie.  She was just as ebullient in person, with that same glow and sparkle of life. 

It was only later that I realized I forgot to tell her the most important thing, which was this:

“Ingelore, watching you tell your story gives me courage.”

[Thirty Day Hub Challenge #17]