February 23, 2020 - The Last Mentsch - (Germany 2014)

Having spent a lifetime concealing his heritage, an aging Holocaust survivor tries to come to terms with his past. Born Menachem Teitelbaum, Marcus Schwarz (German Academy Award winner Mario Adorf) survived the horrors of Auschwitz with his life only to exterminate his Jewishness, creating a new identity for himself in Germany. Without family, a synagogue or a single Jewish friend, and only a faded tattoo from the camps on his arm, the hardened old man has so effectively created a new identity that, when faced with his own mortality, the rabbis refuse his appeal to be buried in a Jewish cemetery in Cologne. 

Determined to return to his birthplace and establish his ancestry, Marcus enlists the help of Gül (Katharina Derr), a brash, chain-smoking Turkish woman with a troubled history of her own. The unlikely duo sets out on a road trip to the small village of his birth on the Hungarian-Romanian border, a journey that will irrevocably change them both. 

Director Pierre-Henry Salfati’s emotional narrative of friendship and healing explores the cost of forgetting the past, and the power in remembering it. 

Languages: English, German, Hebrew, Hungarian, and Yiddish w/ English subtitles 

Running time: 93 minutes