The five nominees for the Best Documentary Feature Academy Award were recently announced along with the other nominations. Every film seems a worthy inclusion on the list, though the excellent Inside Job appears to have a lock on the Oscar. Each nominee will benefit with renewed press attention, a higher profile, more inclusions in Netflix queues, and perhaps even wider distribution. Unfortunately, those powerful documentaries that did not make the cut will fall off the radar. So many worthy documentaries are produced by dedicated filmmakers who pour their lives into their projects only to find that they are at the mercy of spotty distribution and a fair-weather press.
The Rescuers by Michael King was recently chosen Best of the Fest by audiences at the Palm Springs International Film Festival. Of the 190+ films at the fest, 33 were selected by viewers to be showcased on the last day as Best of the Fest, and it is a testament to this film’s popularity that it made the cut. Director King is currently traveling the country exhibiting The Rescuers at cinematheques and entering it into additional film festivals. Later this month, the film pops up in Beloit, Wisconsin, and before that it will be part of the festivities at the 123rd Kenesseth Israel Congregation Anniversary Banquet in Minneapolis on February 13. (continued)
The Rescuers chronicles the heroic efforts of non-Jewish diplomats from several different countries, who, against the orders of their superiors, saved as many as 200,000 European Jews during World War II. Essentially mild-mannered diplomats and anonymous envoys, these men used what they knew—shuffling papers, handling travel orders, issuing passes—to help as many Jews as possible receive safe passage or safe harbor. Many Rescuers, often called the Righteous Diplomats, risked their own safety, their careers, and even their lives to help strangers they never knew.
The Righteous Diplomats included relief official Varian Fry, an American Quaker in France, who rescued many artists and intellectuals, including painters Marc Chagall and Max Ernst. Fry “created” official papers and visas for many who passed through his office in Marseilles. Fry worked for Hiram Bingham IV, a U.S. vice consul who looked the other way as the little Quaker hustled people out of Occupied France. Turkish diplomat Selahattin Ulkumen, who was stationed in Rhodes, saved the lives of some 42 Turkish Jewish families, totaling more than 200 persons, after the Nazis took over the island. In retaliation for Ulkumen’s continuous efforts to prevent the deportation of Jews, the Germans bombed the Turkish consulate on Rhodes, and Ulkumen’s pregnant wife was killed. Prince Charles’s grandmother, Princess Alice of Greece, is acknowledged in the film for taking in a Jewish family and hiding them during the war—a story about the Royal Family much more interesting than William and Kate’s upcoming nuptials.
The film is structured around the “search” for remaining records or witnesses to the Rescuers’ efforts. The search is conducted by Sir Martin Gilbert, a historian and author of 82 books, who has been the Official Biographer of Winston Churchill since 1968, publishing seven volumes, including Churchill A Life, plus twelve volumes of related documents. In addition, Gilbert has researched and written extensively about the Holocaust, including a book called The Righteous, which is the story of Christians who saved the lives of Jews during the Holocaust.
The specter of Schindler’s List hangs over any project related to the Holocaust, and to prevent his documentary from becoming a facile "true story of the Oscar Schindlers of WWII” a la the History Channel, King employed a potent strategy to make the material not only memorable but relevant. Helping Gilbert in his interviews and research is Stephanie Nyombaryire, a young anti-genocide activist from Rwanda. Members of Nyombaryire’s family, including her elderly grandmother, were brutally murdered in Rwanda’s civil war during the early 1990s. She has devoted her life to making a difference, which includes cofounding the Genocide intervention Network and speaking out about Darfur to colleges in America. Nyombaryire’s participation in this project reminds us that genocide is not only a regrettable tragedy found in the history books but also an unacceptable travesty that continues in our lifetime. The past informs the present as Gilbert and Nyombaryire conduct their research: They uncover the atrocities committed against the Jews and then look for survivors who were helped by the Rescuers, prompting Nyombaryire—and us—to wonder why there weren’t more rescuers for the people of Rwanda.
The idea that the past is indelibly connected to the present is not only part of the structure but also echoed in the visual techniques. In some sequences, contemporary shots of famous locales morph into black and white historic footage to remind us of the close ties between past and present. For example, when Gilbert and Nyombaryire take a train to visit escape routes from an occupied country to a safe one, a shot of their train rounding a bend melds into historic footage of a train taking that same bend 60 years ago, perhaps carrying escapees from Nazi persecution. Most chilling is a scene in which Gilbert shows Nyombaryire the hotel room in Paris where Hitler surveyed the Eiffel Tower after taking control of France. As Gilbert walks out onto the balcony to see the Tower, the image morphs into Hitler on that same balcony. The technique immediately and effectively ties past to present—and all that that implies—without a single word of explanation.
More than just facts and figures about history, The Rescuers ponders the nature of heroism for individuals as well as for diplomacy as an institution. What about the Righteous Diplomats made them take risks when others did not? Why did their agencies or governments tell them not to get involved? What would contemporary governments or ambassadors do in similar situations? These questions are not answered but posited so that viewers are left with much more than a History Channel-style documentary. Susan Doll
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