The documentary portrays Erich Finsches, a true Viennese original and Holocaust survivor. Based on over six years of collected material by director Matthias Jaklitsch, who supported Erich on his travels, the film shows him as a positive, humorous, but also argumentative and unique personality in all his humanity. At 97, Erich continues to tirelessly advocate for remembrance of the past, attending memorial ceremonies and schools to spread his message of "Never Again." Instead of a traditional "eyewitness narrative," the film not only documents Erich's life, his youth during Nazi persecution, and his rebuilding of a new life after the war, but also the relationship between the director and the protagonist.

The documentary portrays Erich Finsches, a true Viennese original and Holocaust survivor. Based on over six years of collected material by director Matthias Jaklitsch, who supported Erich on his travels, the film shows him as a positive, humorous, but also argumentative and unique personality in all his humanity. At 97, Erich continues to tirelessly advocate for remembrance of the past, attending memorial ceremonies and schools to spread his message of "Never Again." Instead of a traditional "eyewitness narrative," the film not only documents Erich's life, his youth during Nazi persecution, and his rebuilding of a new life after the war, but also the relationship between the director and the protagonist.
2025-11-27
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The Story of Erich Finsches
7.0A documentary about America's knowledge of the Holocaust during the Second World War dares to ask, ""Could the Jews of Europe have been saved?"
9.0The first official Jewish transport to Auschwitz consisted of 999 Slovak girls and young women. This documentary features several survivors from that transport.
0.0In 1961, history was on trial... in a trial that made history. Just 15 years after the end of WWII, the Holocaust had been largely forgotten. That changed with the capture of Adolf Eichmann, a former Nazi officer hiding in Argentina. Through rarely-seen archival footage, The Eichmann Trial documents one of the most shocking trials ever recorded, and the birth of Holocaust awareness and education.
Their names are Chorowicz, Cyroulnik, Glichtzman, Feldhandler... They were born in France, after the second world war. Their families came from Central and Eastern Europe in the 20s and 30s, fleeing antisemitism and poverty. After the Holocaust, they grew up among ghosts, between anger, a desire for vengeance and a will to change the world. In the 60s and 70s, they became activists. Through their personal stories and the tale of their internationalist and antifascist struggle, the movie shows the audacity of those years of dissent.
7.3A funny walk through the life story of Billy Wilder (1906-2002), a cinematic genius; a portrait of a filmmaker who never was a boring man, a superb mind who had ten commandments, of which the first nine were: “Thou shalt not bore.”
7.3A documentary that exposes the shocking truths behind industrial food production and food wastage, focusing on fishing, livestock and crop farming. A must-see for anyone interested in the true cost of the food on their plate.
4.1In the most personal and unflinching film of his career, historian Simon Schama confronts the enormity of the Holocaust and the catastrophe experienced by its victims. In a journey that ends with his first visit to Auschwitz, Simon travels across the Continent to explore how the Holocaust was far more than a Nazi obsession that played out in gas chambers, but a European-wide crime of complicity. From bullets in the Lithuanian lands of his ancestors to bureaucracy in the Netherlands, he reveals how deep-rooted prejudice was weaponised to turn people against their Jewish neighbours. As a moving interview with a survivor reveals, the story of how ‘evil comes step by step’ remains powerfully relevant today.
6.6What would your family reminiscences about dad sound like if he had been an early supporter of Hitler’s, a leader of the notorious SA and the Third Reich’s minister in charge of Slovakia, including its Final Solution? Executed as a war criminal in 1947, Hanns Ludin left behind a grieving widow and six young children, the youngest of whom became a filmmaker. It's a fascinating, maddening, sometimes even humorous look at what the director calls "a typical German story." (Film Forum)
5.7A documentary about the life of Jewish children forced to live in the Theresienstadt concentration camp.
This Emmy Award-winning documentary traces the rise of Nazism in general and the career of Adolf Eichmann in particular by documenting the small incremental steps the Nazis took to introduce their ideology of anti-semitism in Germany and Nazi-occupied Europe during World War II.
4.5This story follows one man's quest to uncover the origins and reveal the mysteries of a possible Holocaust artifact some historians now say never existed: lampshades made of human skin. When the flood waters of Hurricane Katrina receded, they left behind a wrecked New Orleans and a strange looking lamp that an illicit dealer claimed was 'made from the skin of Jews.'
7.2Eva Mozes Kor, who survived Josef Mengele's cruel twin experiments in the Auschwitz concentration camp, shocks other Holocaust survivors when she decides to forgive the perpetrators as a way of self-healing.
7.7The Holocaust is one of the most documented, witnessed and written about events in history, so why is Holocaust denial back on the political agenda? What has happened in the 75 years since the liberation of the camps to have so skewed the picture? And, if it matters, why does it matter?
4.5An account of the short life and the astonishing and provocative work of the Austrian painter Egon Schiele (1890-1918), seen through the peculiar point of view and the critic voices of the women who defined the paramount milestones of his existence: Gerti, his sister; Wally, his main model and lover; and Edith, his wife. A brief story of love, hate, betrayal and misfortune.
0.0The stories of Eitan, Yigal and Miri show how long the past can cast its shadows. Their Holocaust-surviving parents were abused by the Nazis, then became abusers themselves—their fear and grief transformed into aggression and anger towards their children. For the first time on-screen, children of Holocaust survivors talk openly about the mental and physical suffering they experienced. Stories of abuse contrast with cheerful-looking black-and-white photos of the families. Even the grandchildren appear to be suffering from their parents’ burden of sorrow and pain. The children's attempt to talk about the past, as with Eitan and his ailing mother and Miri with her son, seem futile. The palpable inability to make contact is almost unbearable. Shadows asks the unavoidable questions: how long will the Holocaust continue to exert its evil influence on future generations, and how can the demons of the past be exorcised?
Two friends, two Viennese, two poets, two unusual women. They have known each other for 30 years. Elfriede Jelinek is the better known of the two, the great author with her analytical mind and her social commitment against the whole "politician's docks." The now deceased lyricist Elfriede Gerstl remains rather tender with her poetry, although her poems do not miss a certain amount of sharpness, albeit ironically packed. When the two Elfrieden sit in their Viennese coffee house and drink the little brown, they usually talk about clothes, they talk about the fashion that Elfriede Gerstl has just collected again.
7.5The secret Nazi death camp at Sobibor was created solely for the mass extermination of Jews. But on the 14th October 1943, in one of the biggest and most successful prison revolts of WWII, the inmates fought back.
6.8The history of the Warsaw Ghetto (1940-43) as seen from both sides of the wall, its legacy and its memory: new light on a tragic era of division, destruction and mass murder thanks to the testimony of survivors and the discovery of a ten-minute film shot by Polish amateur filmmaker Alfons Ziółkowski in 1941.