AHEC announces Holocaust in Film series

“The Commandant’s Shadow”

The Alabama Holocaust Education Center will host its 12th annual Holocaust In Film series, starting Jan. 28, at Sidewalk Film Center. The series starts with “The Commandant’s Shadow,” and all screenings in the series are at 6 p.m.

The film explores the journey of Hans Jurgen Hoss, son of Rudolf Hoss, the camp commandant of Auschwitz, as he confronts his father’s legacy in the extermination of over 1 million Jews. The screening will be one day after the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.

UAB Professor Michele Forman and AHEC Program Manager Haley Wells will lead a discussion after the film. Tickets to all screenings are $10, but due to a sponsorship by the University of Alabama at Birmingham Department of History and UAB Media Studies, students can attend this film free.

“Unbroken” will be screened on Feb. 4 at 6 p.m. The 2014 film is based on the story of Louis Zamperini, a U.S. Olympian who was a pilot in World War II. After his plane was shot down, he survived on a raft in the ocean for 47 days before being captured by the Japanese and sent to a series of prisoner of war camps.

On Feb. 11, there will be a screening of “Fighting Antisemitism: Student Produced Documentaries.” In 2023, students in the Summer Internship Course of the Beacon Academy of Media and Digital Arts in South Elgin, Ill., had four weeks to research and produce short documentaries that investigated this question, with the supervision of digital arts instructor Brian Erlich. This group of all non-Jewish students spent half of their summer devoted to learning about antisemitism and how to fight against it.

The 10 students chose the topics of their films, and had a wide range of projects, from interviewing a young Muslim male in Malmo, Sweden working against antisemitism, to featuring a Jewish gay organization working to promote tolerance.

Through a partnership with the Jewish Community Relations Council of the Birmingham Jewish Federation, tickets are free for students and teachers.

The series concludes with “Goebbels and the Fuhrer” on Feb. 25, a 2024 film about how Hilter’s propaganda minister tries to put on a happy face as Germany spirals to defeat in World War II, and he plans the staging of Hitler’s suicide and his own.