Filmclub report 8
The main lesson I learned from last week’s showing of “The edges of the Lord” that no matter how big stars are in a movie (Osment and Dafoe) and no matter how important I consider the topic, people are not interested in watching “yet another” movie about the Holocaust. Only four of us showed up. Two of the visitors were from the Church of Nazarene (I hope I got their church’s name correctly in my conservation with them). In a way they were a more suitable audience, because the movie had just as much Christian content and references than Jewish, if not more. For example, Tolo, a young boy developed a “Jesus complex” and wanted to become and act similar to him. For example upon learning that Jesus was a Jew, he started to consider himself one. He carried this to the extreme, but I do not want to spoil the end of the movie for those who did not see it yet. His actions were more in vein with the Christian concept of sin and repentance than with the Jewish version of the above.
With the exception of the German characters, a Polish man and his son everyone was a positive person. The priest, the children, the villagers were all good people. This in itself would not have been a problem for me. Considering that the movie was written and directed by a Polish artist and was produced mostly from Polish money it is understandable. But I feel a bit of an imbalance, because I do not know of too many movies that shows the traditional Polish anti-Semitism. I think that if there are a only a few movies are made of the Shoah in Poland it should be more proportionate in its description of how many people helped and how many did not the Jews. This is not to belittle those heroes who saved (or tried to) lives. This movie showed the compassionate side of that nation, which surely exists, but that is not the only one.
The movie is available for borrowing in the library on DVD.
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