Audience Member
Extremely poignant and moving. A happy ending that is too good to be true but it is. Extraordinary!
Rated 5/5 Stars •
Rated 5 out of 5 stars
01/29/23
Full Review
Audience Member
The older I get, the more I am a fan of good documentaries. I'm not talking about the ones furiously exposing political ideologies for what they are - though there are a few of those I can recommend. Rather, I like a good slice of history. It's even better when it's coupled with a specific point-of-view. With most of the folks who survived the atrocities of World War II passing into history themselves, I didn't expect much from SURVIVING HITLER: A LOVE STORY, but I came away fascinated by the surprisingly personal account of one woman's struggle to maintain her family and her sanity against seemingly insurmountable odds.
Jutta Cord was little more than a teenage girl dreaming of her future when she brought home from school a card her teachers required her parents to complete. The educators wanted to know the lineage of her family - specifically, they wanted to know if she was a Jew - and, as fate would have it, her mother was half-Jewish. Immediately, this placed the young girl in great jeopardy. Her quick thinking father insisted on relocating her to Switzerland, but, when things turned bad for her parents back home, Jutta returned, putting herself fresh in the tracks of the oppressive Nazi government. What emerges is a story of unlikely triumph in the face of harrowing tensions. SURVIVING HITLER is a tremendous achievement. Jutta's love story here explores her relationship with Helmuth Cord - her eventual husband - a young man who was brought up believing it proper to serve one's country. What he never planned for was the rise of Hitler and Nazi Germany.
The documentary is given a wonderful human imprint by the fact that Helmuth's was one of the few families to have a video camera at the perilous time in history. These home movies capture the mood of the proud people in the days leading up to the second World War, meaning a great deal of footage could be editing together for presentation here. Projected against Jutta's account of the war, her separation from her family and boyfriend, and their eventual reunion, it's all pricelessly human. All of her emotions - love, desperation, fear, bewilderment - are given new life here, and her accounting of these events are as vivid as if it all took place yesterday.
In fact, I can only cite a single drawback to the entire presentation: however unfortunate it may be for me to admit it, I have some difficulty in understand some of Jutta's story precisely because of her thick German accent. I think the filmmakers would've been better served to incorporate a subtitle track for those of us Americans who struggle with accents. It would've been an easy fix. Clearly, they found it necessary to subtitle Helmuth's narrated accounts (as he passed away in the early 70's, it's actually performed by Christopher Karl Johnson), a curious choice given the fact that he speaks clearly but through the effect of 'special recorded audio,' and I don't understand why they didn't see the need with Jutta. As the film progresses, I did find it easier most of the time, but, especially in the picture's early moments and those told with some emotion, it would've improved the experience.
Also, for anyone who's seen the Tom Cruise picture VALKYRIE, this documentary will be a special delight as Helmuth Cord was directly involved in the mission to assassinate Adolf Hitler! This documentary serves as a terrific companion piece to that.
SURVIVING HITLER has played to tremendous acclaim. It won the title of 'Grantee Kroll Fund for Jewish Documentary Film.' It's also been cited as a winner in the Full Frame Inspiration Award as well as the Winner of the Spirit Award for the Ojai Film Festival. All one need do is visit the film's official website to see a list of accolades awarded the picture. It's a tremendous 66 minutes of history.
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED. As mentioned above, the only issues I had with SURVIVING HITLER relate entirely to creative choices. While I would've appreciated a subtitle track accompanying Jutta's narration, others - those more experienced with accents - may've had little problem with it. So far as her story goes, she provides yet one more harrowing account of what life was like under the darkly oppressive rule of Hitler; all of us can only hope that this chapter of history never repeats itself, and reminders like this can go a long way toward making that our collective reality.
In the interests of fairness, I'm pleased to disclose that the fine folks at Osiris Entertainment provided me with a DVD screener copy of SURVIVING HITLER by request for the expressed purposes of completing this review.
Rated 4/5 Stars •
Rated 4 out of 5 stars
01/14/23
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