Watermarks

Watermarks (2004)

The story of the Hakoah Vienna Jewish womens swim team of the 1930s, their forced separation, and their reunion decades later.

Date of release
2004-12-10
TMDB
7.4 / 10 (8)
Runtime
1h 20m
Genres
History, Documentary
Director
Yaron Zilberman

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Filmed in: Vienna

Watermarks is a 2004 award-winning theatrical feature documentary co-written and directed by Yaron Zilberman as his directorial debut. The film reunites the champion women swimmers of the legendary Jewish sports club, Hakoah Vienna, who were forced to disband during the rise of fascism in 1930s Austria.

Trivia

One of the women featured in the film, Judith Haspel, was a record-setting swimmer who was selected to represent Austria in the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin. She refused to go and was stripped of her records and banned from competition. Her records were reinstated in 1995.

The song that accompany the swimming scene at Amalienbad, Dein ist mein ganzes Herz ("Yours is My Heart Alone"), is from the operetta Das Land des Lächelns composed by Franz Lehár to the lyrics of the first president of Hakoah Vienna, Fritz Löhner-Beda. Löhner-Beda was sent to Auschwitz after the Anschluss where he was shot to death by a Nazi officer for not running quickly enough.

When Zilberman started to research the project he was planning to make a film about Hakoah Vienna's soccer team. Only after he met with the women swimmers as part of his research, he realized that their personalities and the story of the women swim team should be the subject of the film.

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

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