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THE PROJECT

When the Holocaust is mentioned, most people recall images of tattooed numbers on forearms, footage of children in striped uniforms in Auschwitz or Hitler's speeches. Dispelling our notions of a "Holocaust documentary", Forgotten Transports have none of that. Based on 400 hours of interviews recorded in twenty countries on five continents and ten years of work, each of the four films describes one destination of Nazi transports and one unique "mode of survival" in extreme conditions - told, for the first time, by Czech and Central European Jews deported to unknown ghettos and camps in Latvia, Belarus, Estonia and Poland.

The film about Estonia offers a fascinating story of a group of young women and girls who - thanks to youthful naivety, friendship, mutual help and giving up individual thinking - managed to pass through camps while remaining oblivious to the genocide around them. Unlike in Estonia, where there were no male survivors, from the 7,000 Czech deportees to Belarus no women came back. However, twenty-two fiercely self-reliant men did, due to resistance and armed struggle. These men fought, were killed, but also killed.

Forgotten Transports to Latvia depict the effort to preserve a semblance of normal family life in ghettos and camps. Young people fell in love, danced at clandestine parties, children attended school but on the way to it had to pass by the gallows - life in the shadow of death. The film about deportations to eastern Poland is concerned with the psyche of people permanently on the run, constantly in hiding, who had to continually feign and change identities.

The film on "Poland" is thus a story of the loneliness of individuals who have to joke to survive, "Latvia" is a story of families, "Belarus" of men and "Estonia" of women. Each film is designed to stand on its own but when screened as a series, a certain superstructure becomes apparent, allowing the viewer to compare individual survival strategies, reactions and difficult choices faced by people exposed to ultimate violence.

Employing no commentary or contemporary footage, only true, time-and-place precise images, the director (and political scientist and historian) Lukáš Přibyl documents every word of the witnesses by painstakingly researched visual materials - pictures exchanged for bottles of vodka in Polish villages, found in albums of former SS men and their lovers, fetched from KGB holdings or through film fragments selected in over 1600 hours of footage perused in official archives. The people speaking in the films can thus be seen on images taken almost seventy years ago. From an astonishing story of concentration camp Romeo and Juliet to that of a man locked up in the same prison three times, always under a different identity, this minimalist montage of narrow, personal points of view and never seen materials combines to paint a life-affirming picture of survival through luck, wisdom, ingenuity and sheer will and shows the Holocaust "as we don't know it".

 

 

 
 
"A monumental quartet of films… seminal documentation of a little-known piece of WWII history..."
Alissa Simon, VARIETY, July 27, 2009
"For years no documentary depicting the Nazi persecution of Jews during WWII created such a buzz..."
Irena Zemanová, HOSPODÁŘSKÉ NOVINY, February 9, 2010
"...the most important enterprise in Czech documentary film of recent years."
Irena Hejdová, TÝDEN, January 25, 2010
"The four part series...which aspires to become one of the greatest Czech documentary events of the recent years, cannot but be compared with Claude Lanzmann's renowned film Shoah."
Aleš Borovan, E15, January 28, 2010
"...Forgotten Transports stand out from the multitude of Holocaust documentaries..."
Joseph Berger, THE NEW YORK TIMES, March 26, 2010
"The films...expand our understanding of the Holocaust like no films since the classic Shoah."
Hynek Pallas, SVENSKA DAGBLADET critic, Gothenburg IFF, January 2010
"The Forgotten Transports project of Lukas Pribyl shines a powerful and enlightening spotlight on a virtually unknown chapter of the Holocaust..."
Efraim Zuroff, director of Simon Wiesenthal Center Jerusalem, December 28, 2010
"One would think that by now there are very few stories left untold from the Shoah. But 'Forgotten Transports' touches on new ground, both in content and form."
George Robinson, JEWISH WEEK, March 23, 2010
"That...the series, makes such a fresh and powerful impression owes much to Pribyl's painstaking methodology."
Alissa Simon, VARIETY, July 27, 2009
"All archive material - moving or still images, much of it I guess shown for the first time - are connected to the places, events and time that the storytellers refer to."
Tue Steen Müller, FILMKOMMENTAREN.DK, January 6, 2011
"We see images we have thought cannot exist..."
Jiří Peňás, TÝDEN, March 16, 2009
"Over 10 years and visits to 30 countries, [Pribyl] hunted down photographs of SS camp commanders and snapshots taken by local residents and workers who might have encountered inmates, sometimes trading bottles of vodka for the artifacts"
Joseph Berger, THE NEW YORK TIMES, March 26, 2010
"...[Pribyl] would conduct hundreds of interviews and sift through thousands of hours of film footage and photographs to document the story... "
George Robinson, JEWISH WEEK, March 23, 2010
"The creation of the four films in the Forgotten Transports project deserves its own film. "
Tue Steen Müller, FILMKOMMENTAREN.DK, January 6, 2011
"Pribyl has found material that will be unfamiliar to almost any viewer, no small achievement in an age in which Holocaust documentaries are plentiful."
George Robinson, JEWISH WEEK, March 23, 2010
"Forgotten transports prove that even sixty-five years after the war, not everything has been revealed."
Irena Zemanová, HOSPODÁŘSKÉ NOVINY, February 9, 2010
"These are without doubt the best-documented Holocaust films I have seen. "
Zuzana Justman, EMMY winner, February 21, 2010
"The impression conveyed is that a photographer was along for the nightmare ride of the Czech Jews."
Joseph Berger, THE NEW YORK TIMES, March 26, 2010
"It is about Czech Jews but the stories have a universal appeal."
Tue Steen Müller, FILMKOMMENTAREN.DK, January 6, 2011
"Pribyl has done a magnificent job of research and filmmaking."
Efraim Zuroff, director of Simon Wiesenthal Center Jerusalem, December 28, 2010
"...an entrancing film both in content and form..."
Jiří Peňás, TÝDEN, March 16, 2009
"...skillfully edited images and testimonies form a powerful documentary, all the more effectively suggestive through its beautifully minimalist music..."
Hynek Pallas, SVENSKA DAGBLADET critic, Gothenburg IFF, January 2010
"Superbly crafted, Lukas Pribyl's landmark series contains extraordinary stories...as well as a profusion of striking newly-discovered footage and stills. "
Zuzana Justman, EMMY winner, February 21, 2010
"The four films ... are brilliantly conceived."
George Robinson, JEWISH WEEK, March 23, 2010
"It is a summary of archetypal stories about exceptional and often random miracle of survival."
Jiří Peňás, TÝDEN, March 16, 2009
"The films weave several strands in an approach echoing the chapter structure of Joyce's 'Ulysses'."
Joseph Berger, THE NEW YORK TIMES, March 26, 2010
"Pribyl's series is breathtaking, no matter where it is screened. It is a project that stands its ground among the very best that has been filmed about the Holocaust."
Darina Křivánková, TÝDEN, July 17, 2009
"What an achievement! I don't recall when was the last time that I witnessed so captivating a historical documentary..."
Tue Steen Müller, FILMKOMMENTAREN.DK, January 6, 2011
"Lukas Pribyl's films are as suspenseful as they are important..."
Zuzana Justman, EMMY winner, February 21, 2010
"Lukas Pribyl's documentary contains tremendous power."
Jakub Leníček, CZECH RADIO, December 12, 2009
"The films result in fantastic narratives that overshadow the most suspenseful of thrillers."
Jiří Peňás, TÝDEN, March 16, 2009
"Unlike typical Holocaust docus, his films don't catalogue Nazi crimes, dwelling on how many people perished where... "
Alissa Simon, VARIETY, July 27, 2009
"By shifting focus from the evils of Nazism to questions of survival, life, death, love, family and treason, the portraits and the historical narrative also become much more human - and thus more understandable and horrible."
Hynek Pallas, SVENSKA DAGBLADET critic, Gothenburg IFF, January 2010
"...each of the four films takes the viewer on a journey...Or to be more precise: the survivors take the viewer with their personal stories, told in shocking and moving detail, but also with humor."
Tue Steen Müller, FILMKOMMENTAREN.DK, January 6, 2011
"Told in their own words, without commentary, these survival stories run the gamut, from a forbidden love affair to a survivor's participation in the Sobibor uprising."
Alissa Simon, VARIETY, July 27, 2009
"By focusing on the survivors alone, Pribyl shifts the discourse in his four films to the extraordinary circumstances and sheer ferocious will to live that made survival possible. "
George Robinson, JEWISH WEEK, March 23, 2010
"...the films are a celebration of life that finds its way through the worst of hell."
Naďa Klevisová, HOSPODÁŘSKÉ NOVINY, March 26, 2010
"Each film ... depicts a different mode of survival."
Joseph Berger, THE NEW YORK TIMES, March 26, 2010
"...the four films that are as different as the fates [of the survivors] were different, sometimes very hard to watch and listen to, sometimes you smile."
Tue Steen Müller, FILMKOMMENTAREN.DK, January 6, 2011
"...the helmer formed relationships with the survivors, sometimes taking up to two years to persuade them to participate."
Alissa Simon, VARIETY, July 27, 2009
"...almost all of the interview subjects are telling their stories for the first time."
George Robinson, JEWISH WEEK, March 23, 2010
"Most of the subjects had never spoken of their wartime experiences before, not even to their own children."
Alissa Simon, VARIETY, July 27, 2009
"Forgotten Transports move far beyond the traditional depictions of the Holocaust; far from the overarching historical portrait of Nazi leadership in Berlin, and far from Auschwitz."
Hynek Pallas, SVENSKA DAGBLADET critic, Gothenburg IFF, January 2010
"Lukas Pribyl did more than track down survivors or burrow through film archives and deportation records."
Joseph Berger, THE NEW YORK TIMES, March 26, 2010
"Instead, his work speaks about universals such as life, death, family, love and betrayal, while documenting distinct modes of survival in places including Latvia, Estonia and Belarus, as well as Poland."
Alissa Simon, VARIETY, July 27, 2009
"The human spirit is amazing. And that spirit is the true subject of Forgotten Transports. "
George Robinson, JEWISH WEEK, March 23, 2010
"The films...capture eruptions of human quirkiness - sometimes generous, sometimes cruel - that bring the Holocaust down to an earthly level."
Joseph Berger, THE NEW YORK TIMES, March 26, 2010
"...multihypenate Lukas Pribyl, focuses on the difficult choices made by individuals escaping Nazi ghettos, labor and death camps..."
Alissa Simon, VARIETY, July 27, 2009
"Sensitive approach, honest work, great emotional charge and unbelievable vitality of people who passed through hell but did not lose insight and optimism - these are elements that make Forgotten transports one of the most impressive documentaries"
Jakub Leníček, CZECH RADIO, December 12, 2009