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My Mother's Courage

Screening on Film
Directed by Michael Verhoeven.
With George Tabori, Pauline Collins, Ulrich Tukur.
Germany/UK/Austria/Ireland, 1995, 35mm, color, 89 min.
English and German with English subtitles.

From Michael Verhoeven, director of the 1990 Academy Award-nominated film The Nasty Girl, comes this stunning film version of Hungarian author George Tabori’s play and novel. Shifting between Nazi-occupied Budapest and present-day Berlin, the film artfully depicts the true story of what happened to Tabori’s mother Elsa on a summer's day in 1944. Pauline Collins' stellar performance as Elsa, plucked from her everyday life and thrown into the surreal nightmare of mass deportation, affords an extraordinary account of one individual's escape from death juxtaposed with that of the millions who did not survive. Verhoeven’s satirical darkly humorous film about fate and human cruelty forges new ground in cinematic portrayals of the Holocaust.

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