The Laura and Alvin Siegal Lifelong Learning Program
FILMS & CONVERSATION
NICKY'S FAMILY
March 6, 2013 - 7:00pm
South Franklin Circle 16600 Warren Court, Chagrin Falls, Oh, 44022 Nicky’s Family tells the nearly forgotten story of Nicholas Winton, an Englishman who organized the rescue of 669 Czech and Slovak children just before the outbreak of World War II. Winton, now 102 years old, did not speak about these events with anyone for more than half a century. His exploits would have probably been forgotten if his wife, fifty years later, hadn’t found a suitcase in the attic, full of documents and transport plans. This part-dramatization, part-documentary film, is recounted in part by those children he rescued - now in their 70s and 80s. Click to Register |
The Reel Israel 2013: Films & Conversations
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Mendelsohn's Incessant Visions
Spring Semester (TBA)
In March of 1933, German Jewish architect Erich Mendelsohn fled Berlin, having been stripped of his membership in the Architects’ Union and foreseeing even graver consequences from Hitler’s rise to power. He and his wife, Luise, stepped off the train in Amsterdam and bumped into an acquaintance. Surprised at seeing the head of what was then Germany’s largest architectural firm in the Netherlands, the man asked Mendelsohn what he was doing there. The architect took a pencil out of his pocket and held it in the air.
“I’m relocating my office,” he shortly declared.
It wouldn’t be the last time Mendelsohn would start over in a foreign land.
This revealing anecdote is recounted in Incessant Visions, a seductive and complicated new documentary from Israeli director Duki Dror [a short interview with the director follows this review]. The film melds the story of Mendelsohn’s many triumphs, from his rise as an architectural superstar in Berlin and his triumphant designs in the Middle East and America, to bitter disappointments in all the same places. The personal lives—Mendelsohn and his wife are presented here as equals—of these towering twentieth-century figures are explored, too, beyond the blueprints, from friendships with Albert Einstein and Frank Lloyd Wright to Luise’s affair with leftist German poet-politician Ernst Toller.
In March of 1933, German Jewish architect Erich Mendelsohn fled Berlin, having been stripped of his membership in the Architects’ Union and foreseeing even graver consequences from Hitler’s rise to power. He and his wife, Luise, stepped off the train in Amsterdam and bumped into an acquaintance. Surprised at seeing the head of what was then Germany’s largest architectural firm in the Netherlands, the man asked Mendelsohn what he was doing there. The architect took a pencil out of his pocket and held it in the air.
“I’m relocating my office,” he shortly declared.
It wouldn’t be the last time Mendelsohn would start over in a foreign land.
This revealing anecdote is recounted in Incessant Visions, a seductive and complicated new documentary from Israeli director Duki Dror [a short interview with the director follows this review]. The film melds the story of Mendelsohn’s many triumphs, from his rise as an architectural superstar in Berlin and his triumphant designs in the Middle East and America, to bitter disappointments in all the same places. The personal lives—Mendelsohn and his wife are presented here as equals—of these towering twentieth-century figures are explored, too, beyond the blueprints, from friendships with Albert Einstein and Frank Lloyd Wright to Luise’s affair with leftist German poet-politician Ernst Toller.
