Our Children

Our Children (1948)

אונדזערע קינדער

This semi-documentary film (and Poland’s last Yiddish feature) features the comedy duo Shimon Dzigan and Israel Shumacher who had recently returned from the Soviet Union, and Jewish children who had survived the Holocaust. Directed on location by Nathan Gross and Shaul Goskind at at the JDC-supported Helenowek Colony, an orphanage and school near Lodz, this film includes Dzigan and Shumacher's virtuoso turn as all the characters in Sholem Aleichem's Kasrilevke Brent (Kasrilevke is Burning), and an exchange of roles where they become the children's audience. Reversals continue during the performers' visit to the children's residence, as the children teach adults about the healing possibilities of music, dance and storytelling.

Date of release
1948-01-01
TMDB
9.7 / 10 (3)
Runtime
1h 8m
Genres
Drama, Documentary
Director
Natan Gross, Shaul Goskind

Casting

Interesting facts

Our Children is a 1946 semi-documentary Yiddish-language film created in communist Poland. It was directed by Natan Gross and Saul Goskind, based on the script by Rachel Auerbach and Binem Heller. It uses a frame story of the interactions of Jewish orphans who survived the Holocaust with popular Polish comic duo Shimon Dzigan and Israel Shumacher.

Production

It was one of the first films about the Holocaust, particularly on dealing with the issue of "correct" representation of post-Holocaust trauma. Marc Caplan of Johns Hopkins University describes the film genre as "mixing satire, idyl, Holocaust testimony, and expressions of defiant hope". Described as "semi-documentary", much of the film is fictional, including children's Holocaust reminiscences. After the premiere, the film was banned in Poland.

An English-language dubbing was released in 1951 under the title It Will Never Happen Again. The original nitrate print was lost, but later found in 1979, and the film was restored by 1991, with English subtitles added.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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