A FREE MAN: THE LIFE OF ERNO FISCH
Egy szabad ember - Fisch Ernõ élete
Hungary, France | 1998 | 107 min | col.
The life of a man told by himself. Erno Fisch is more than 90 years old. He survived the extermination of Jews in the village of Sziget, which Judit Elek has filmed several times during her directing career. His storytelling, which travels from one to another of the interviews that have taken place in time, is lucid and precise. His words depict the life of the Jewish community in the small Hungarian village but also his experience in Vienna, where he was accommodated in the house of Franz Schubert’s granddaughter. While his words flow, an awareness takes shape: the 20th century was the century of war, of fight, of massacres. Erno Fisch saved his life from the sweep hiding himself in the woods. His voice, the only surviving one, is mirrored in the archival footage that shows bodies and faces of men, women, and children of the Jewish community in a wobbly black and white, the last remnant of lives wiped out by barbaric violence. (d.d.)
Local Time
- Timezone: America/New_York
- Date: 08 Nov 2024
- Time: 9:00
Location
- Cinema La Compagnia - Via Camillo Cavour, 50/R, 50121 Florence
Organizer
-
Judit Elek
Judit Elek (born 10 November 1937) is a Hungarian film director and screenwriter. She directed 16 films. As a child, Judit survived the Second World War first in a sheltered house on Pozsonyi Street, Budapest, and then in the ghetto (November 1944 – January 1945). From 1956 to 1961, she studied at the University of Theatre and Film Arts in Budapest, in the class of film director Félix Máriássy. Her classmates included Pál Gábor, Imre Gyöngyössy, Zoltán Huszárik, Ferenc Kardos, Zsolt Kézdi-Kovács, János Rózsa, Éva Singer and István Szabó. During this time she was a founding member of the Balázs Béla Studio, a workshop for experimental film. In 1968, Elek made her first feature film, Sziget a szárazföldön (The Lady from Constantinople). From the 1980s onwards, she made historical films such as The Trial of Martinovics and the Hungarian Jacobins (1980). In the 1990s, she shot films with a Jewish theme like Tutajosok (Memories of a River, 1990) and To speak the Unspeakable: The Message of Elie Wiesel (1996).
