Adam Resurrected
This vivid film from director Paul Schrader features a tour-de-force performance from Jeff Goldblum, who plays Adam Stein, a former Berlin magician and charismatic circus impresario who survived the Holocaust by using his skills as an entertainer.
The film is set in Israel in 1961, at a remote rehabilitation outpost for Holocaust survivors in the Negev Desert. The story is punctuated by beautifully shot black-and-white flashbacks to Adam's younger days as a successful cabaret performer and later as a prisoner, with his beloved wife and daughters, at the Stellring concentration camp.
Entertainer, clairvoyant, sophisticate and lothario, Stein is haunted by his experiences under the camp's sadistic commandant (Willem Dafoe), and his moods swing from brilliance to madness. He appears to have everyone stymied and overawed, but an unusual new patient seems to have the magnetic power to break him free from the past.
This is a haunting drama of Holocaust memories.
