Filmmaker Ken Burns joins award-winning journalist Michael Krasny, retired public radio host of KQED Forum, for a wide open conversation about Burn’s just released book Our America: A Photographic History and the new three-part series The U.S. and the Holocaust.
This program is part of a Moment series on antisemitism supported by the Joyce and Irving Goldman Family Foundation.
What’s the answer to Chicago’s epidemic of gun crime?
According to Tamar Manasseh, the subject of the new documentary They Ain’t Ready for Me, which chronicles her fight against gun violence on the south side of Chicago, it’s, “Nobody wants to shoot anybody’s mother.”
To assume this is just another depressing Holocaust survivor film would be a huge mistake. Far from it. This outstanding documentary, about survival and the joys of living, is suffused with humor and boundless energy.
Moment has its origins in Eastern Europe. Leonard Fein and Elie Wiesel named Moment for the influential independent Yiddish-language Der Moment, founded in 1910 in Warsaw, Poland.
Documentary filmmaker Roberta Grossman is obsessed with the Holocaust, always has been. Its ever-present evil—the ultimate “rift in humanity,” she says—just won’t let go. “It’s not that I can’t pull away from it, but rather why others can.” So she asserts on the phone from her home in Los Angeles. Producer Nancy Spielberg (yes, Steven’s sister), with whom Grossman collaborated on the Holocaust documentary Who Will Write Our History, is participating in the conversation from her New York home. Their film, which has already been screened at various festivals worldwide, will make its television debut on the Discovery Channel on January 26 at 3 p.m. The telecast is part of Holocaust Remembrance Day commemorations. It’s also the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.
The remarkable new documentary Afterward is a dissection of nothing less than the last century’s collective trauma of the Jewish people, and a sincere attempt to find its echo in the trauma of Israel’s sworn enemies.
Why make a documentary that is nearly as much fiction as fantasy, and why deliberately attempt to blur the two?
The backward tale, coupled with having young, inexperienced performers play the roles of older adults, just wasn’t believable to audiences, and the show flopped after 16 performances.
