Presented by Neuberger Holocaust Education Centre & Alliance Francaise Toronto.
No registration: first-come, first-served – pay what you can.
Join us for this special film screening and discussion with guests Jérome Prieur, director, and Michael Marrus, historian.
Hélène Berr, a young brilliant Jewish female student of literature at the Sorbonne University, lives in Paris during the Nazi occupation. She keeps a diary from 1942 till 1944, wherein she describes the mounting horrors of the persecution of the Jews. In 1944 she is arrested with her parents and sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau. She dies in Bergen-Belsen, a few days before the liberation of that concentration camp. Her secret diary was kept in the family and finally published in 2008.
Utilizing previously unseen footage shot in occupied Paris, official archival images and family photographs including remarkable home movies, French director Jérôme Prieur offers a highly original and captivating adaptation of Hélène Berr’s journal. Jérôme Prieur's documentary finely illustrates the dual legacy of Hélène's Berr's journal, that of a remarkable literary work as well as a valued historical account of life in occupied Paris at that time. The journal, discovered and published more than 60 years after it was written, became an immediate bestseller in France. "Hélène Berr : Journal 1942-1944" has since been translated and published in more than 25 countries. Watch Trailer
French with English subtitles.