The Neuberger Holocaust Education Centre, TJFF, and the Goethe-Institut Toronto just hosted a screening of Herbert Rappaport & Adolf Minkin’s 1938 Russian antifascist film “Professor Mamlock”, based on the German 1933 play by Friedrich Wolf. It is one of the earliest works dealing with violent Nazi antisemitism and foreshadows the mass murder of Europe’s Jews. In 1961, Friedrich Wolf’s son Konrad Wolf adapted the drama again as a successful DEFA film.Together with historians Dan Panneton and Olga Gershenson, Professor of Judaic and Near Eastern Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, I discussed the three versions of this early antifascist drama.
Many viewers were not aware of many of the early treatments and asked for more film recommendations around the Holocaust and antifascism.
My personal and very partial list of feature film recommendations (+ one doc) focusses on early, (East or West) German or European, some American films around antisemitism, Holocaust, resistance, or explorations of guilt and accountability, leaving out the wave of films from the last two to three decades you have likely seen: the stellar "Son of Saul" by László Nemes, Spielberg’s "Schindler’s List", which had great impact n my youth; Tarantino’s satisfying revenge caper "Inglourious Bastards", Petzold’s enlightening duo "Phoenix" & "Transit", Schloendorff’s "Ninth Day", "Diplomacy" or "The Tin Drum", Lars Kraume’s "The People vs. Fritz Bauer" (the German Jew who brought Eichmann to justice), von Trotta’s emphatic "Hannah Arendt" (who reported on the Eichmann trial from Jerusalem), Canada’s “Sunshine” by István Szabó & Israel Horovitz and “Remember” by Atom Egoyan, or currently “The Collini Case”, written by lawyer Ferdinand von Schirach, who has dedicated his career to addressing the crimes of his grandfather, National Socialist youth leader Baldur von Schirach, and others in books about crime, guilt, dignity and terror.
An incomplete watch list of antifascist cinema:
“Night Train To Munich” (UK, 1940) by Carol Reed is often said to be the first “Holocaust” film, and while the plot shows fictional but fairly real-looking images of a concentration camp, the film is a spy thriller and does not deal with political prisoners or Jewish persecution. It was nominated for Best Writing of an Original Story at the Academy Awards 1942.
How to watch: Available on Daily Motion
“Rome, Open City” (Italy, 1945) by Roberto Rossellini
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With cinemas and film festivals in Canada, Germany and across the world currently closed or postponing their live programming, we are discovering the virtues of streaming. Among the offerings, one of the best is 
It is too tempting not to spend a #stayathome afternoon watching (and reviewing) this film in the middle of the 2020 Corona pandemic: Let's rediscover the East German DEFA film “1-2-3 Corona” by Hans Müller premiered in 1948 at the beautiful, still running Babylon Mitte cinema.
Over the summer I had the chance to skype with Andreas Dresen -full disclosure: one of my favourite auteurs- about his 1992 feature debut "Silent Country", which we showed on 35mm to amazed audiences in Toronto recently. In the film, young, naive and enthusiastic theatre director Kai comes to a grim East German provincial town to put on Beckett's “Waiting for Godot”. Although the lethargic company shows no interest in the play, his spirit remains undaunted. Meanwhile, it is fall 1989. The world is changing and far away in the capital, a revolution is taking place. Great hopes emerge in the little town, and unexpected events overtake Kai's derailed production. Reflections of and on Dresen's own life and work are inevitable. 
