Secret Lives: Hidden Children & Their Rescuers During WWII

• Director: Aviva Slesin
• AMG Rating:
• Genre: History
• Movie Type: Race & Ethnicity, Social History
• Themes: Families in Crisis, Life Under Occupation, Crimes Against Humanity
• Release Year: 2002
• Country: US
• Run Time: 90 minutes
• MPAA Rating: NR

Plot

As an infant at the dawn of World War II, director Aviva Slesin was handed off by her Jewish parents to a Lithuanian family, for safekeeping from the Nazis. Now, Slesin seeks out the stories of other "adoptees" and their families in the documentary Secret Lives: Hidden Children & Their Rescuers During WWII. Over the course of interviews with over five dozen children who escaped the Holocaust, Slesin learns of the struggles, hardships, and love experienced by these displaced sons and daughters, and about their faint memories of their birth parents. By the same token, Slesin finds out the rationales of the families who took them in -- whether due to goodwill, loyalty, or, in some cases, economic gain -- and even examines the resentment felt by some of them toward their "new" brothers and sisters. Featuring a score by avant-garde composer John Zorn, Secret Lives made the festival rounds in 2002, winning an award at the Hamptons Film Festival before its theatrical release in 2003. ~ Michael Hastings, All Movie Guide

Credit

Toby Appleton Perl - Co-producer, Aviva Slesin - Director, Ken Eluto - Editor, Ann Rubenstein Tisch - Executive Producer, John Zorn - Composer (Music Score), Anthony Forma - Cinematographer, Hamar Hader - Cinematographer, Aviva Slesin - Producer, Neil Gettinger - Sound/Sound Designer, Ricardo Levy - Sound/Sound Designer, Toby Appleton Perl - Screenwriter

Similar Movies

Au Revoir Les Enfants; The Diary of Anne Frank; Playing for Time; Shoah; Schindler's List; Anne Frank Remembered; Life Is Beautiful; The Lost Children of Berlin; Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport; The Pianist; My Knees Were Jumping: Remembering the Kindertransport; Hiding and Seeking: Faith and Tolerance After the Holocaust; My 100 Children