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| Just an Ordinary Jew |
A tour-de-force from Oliver Hirschbiegel, director of the Berlin Bunker box-office smash,
Downfall. Based on a book by Swiss author Charles Lewinsky, this mesmerising screen drama addresses the thorny issue of what it means to be Jewish in contemporary Germany.
Emanuel Goldfarb, a German-Jewish journalist, receives a terribly polite letter asking him to speak at a school about his daily life as a 'Jewish fellow citizen' to a group of German schoolchildren. Perishing the thought, Goldfarb writes to the teacher, refusing the invitation. But, to his own surprise, his letter, and with it the film, develops into a monumental settling of accounts in which he starkly confronts Germany's dark past and his German-Jewish identity in no uncertain terms.
It is not possible to do justice in a few sentences to what transpires. Suffice to say, in a dreamlike postscript ending, we see Goldfarb sitting in a classroom before a sea of innocent young German faces, eager to hear the truth of what it's like to be the progeny of a "race" their own grandparents strove so hard to exterminate.
Back by popular demand, this absolutely brilliant film is not to be missed.
