As Seen Through These Eyes
"The story of a brave group of people who fought Hitler with the only weapons they had: charcoal, pencil stubs, shreds of paper, and memories etched in their minds. These artists took their fate into their own hands to make a compelling statement about the human spirit enduring against unimaginable odds."
Beyond the Barbed Wire: An Artist's View of the Holocaust
"Recounts the experiences of Ben Altman, Polish holocaust survivor who in later years realized his lifelong dream of becoming a painter. Presents obvservations on creativity, suffering, and expression."
Death and the Maiden
"Shortly after World War II, over 1000 paintings were found in a cellar in southern France. The paintings were created by a young Jewish artist called Charlotte Salomon. She painted her extraordinary life story in a unique creation named 'Life? Or Theater?' Death & The Maiden is a private journey into the heart of Charlotte Salomon, a sensitive and gifted young woman who lived in one of the darkest times in history...."
Eyewitness
"Auschwitz in art."
Fourteen Stations
"In January of 1993, painter Arie Galles walked out to his backyard studio to begin a series of new drawings.... Ten years later he has completed Fourteen Stations, a series of charcoal drawings based on surveillance photographs of German concentration camps. [This film] documents the effort, the time, the research, and the personal toll the project exacted on the artist."
From Bitter Earth: Artists of the Holocaust
"Interviews with artists who lived through the Holocaust and created works which documented the horrors of the ghettos and Nazi death camps."
The Labyrinth: The Testimony of Marian Kołodziej = Labirynt: świadectwo Mariana Kołodzieja
"Memory, art, love, and hell collide as an Auschwitz survivor finally confronts the horrors of his past after 50 years of silence. Marian Kołodziej was on one of the first transports to enter Auschwitz. He was given number 432. He survived and never spoke of his experience for 50 years. After a serious stroke in 1993, he began rehabilitation by doing pen and ink drawings depicting the experiences he and others endured in the concentration camp. These drawings, in their skeletal detail, are a gripping depiction of the pain, death, and horrors of the camp. While most of the drawings represent the memories of a young man's hellish experiences in Auschwitz, some tell stories of small acts of kindness and dignity. Marian's story of survival, of persistence, of life before, during, and after Auschwitz are a testament to the human spirit. Marian's drawings and art installations, which he called The Labyrinth, fill the large basement of a church near Auschwitz and draw visitors into the horrific reality of the Holocaust. In The Labyrinth Marian takes the audience on a journey through his drawings and art installations. Through the blending of his testimony and the graphic drawings, we explore the memories and nightmares of a man, who like so many others buried experiences deep within. Why would a confrontation with death late in life, trigger the need to record his long-suppressed memories? And why in this graphic, metaphorical way? This documentary raises these questions in a visually stunning way."
Parce que j'étais peintre: l'art rescapé des camps nazis
"This film takes an unprecedented survey of works clandestinely in Nazi camps. It converses with rare deportees, living artists, and the curators of these works; the emotions they evoke, their marginalization, their signatures or their anonymity, their style, as well as the representation of the horror or extermination. More importantly, he contemplates the long drawings, sketches, and paintings kept in the fund in France, Germany, Israel, Poland, the Czech Republic, Belgium, and Switzerland. In this journey of these of these fragments, covert images, and the ruins of former camps, it offers a sensible quest between faces, bodies, and landscapes, to question then notion of work and question frontally the idea of beauty."
A Tailor in the Making
"Examines the art that comes from adversity, specifically paintings by tailor and concentration camp survivor Ben Altman."