The Last of Them
La Dernière d’entre elles | Pierre Goetschel | France, 2018 | French (English subtitles) | Documentary | 72m | Distributor/Sales: Les films de l'œil sauvage | Festival marketing sample: Crossing Europe Film Festival 2020 | Trailer
Description: A few years ago Pierre Goetchel discovered an unfinished handwritten manuscript by his long dead grandmother, Fernande Goetchel, relating what happened to her and her friends at Auschwitz Birkenau. In the early sixties these women reunited and appeared in a silent home movie together. The filmmaker tracks down the last survivor of that group, the 94 year old Rosette Levy. Using interviews with her, actors reading Fernande’s and her companions’ memoirs, clips from The Last Stage a film made by survivors shortly after the war, he brings their stories to life.
Merits: This is probably going to be one of the last documentaries to interview a living survivor. Despite her age, Rosette is sharp, intelligent, dignified, gently humorous and her testimony deeply moving. She connects with us and evidently with the high school audiences she is invited to speak in front of. Goetchel relates the atrocities they suffered without false artifice. In a particularly chilling montage, he uses three sequential allied air surveillance photos of the camps to animate the movement of columns of internees in the camp and the smoke rising from the stacks of the crematorium.
This is a high quality documentary that tells survivor stories in ways we have not seen before.
Rating: References to violence, concentration camp imagery.