The Flat

Released Oct 19, 2012

1h 37m

Documentary

List

85%

Tomatometer

33 Reviews

70%

Audience Score

2,500+ Ratings

Cleaning out an apartment leads to unexpected discoveries and repressed family emotions coming to the surface.

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Joe Williams

St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Arnon's filmmaking is flaccid, with TV-style interviews and rote reaction shots in place of cinematic imagery and deftly edited surprises.

Rated: 2.5/4

Dec 7, 2012

Full Review

Wesley Morris

Boston Globe

There's something touching about the way Goldfinger obeys his moral compass.

Rated: 3/4

Nov 29, 2012

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Lisa Schwarzbaum

Entertainment Weekly

I will salute the deftness and intelligence with which Goldfinger observes the reactions of the living to the revelations of the dead.

Rated: A-

Nov 28, 2012

Full Review

Jordan M. Smith

IONCINEMA.com

The Flat reminds of the importance of genealogy, something that too often gets lost to the sands of time, and in doing so it also highlights the generational gap that allows the suppression of horrors passed...

Feb 9, 2020

Full Review

Amy Taubin

Artforum

One of the most surprising, engaging, and psychologically complex documentaries of recent years.

Aug 4, 2015

Full Review

Philip Martin

Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

It's a mesmerizing detective story ...with an oddly uplifting ending that suggests a commonality of the human spirit that supersedes ideology.

Rated: 89/100

Apr 27, 2013

Full Review

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Audience Member

Watch this with Labyrinth of Lies. It's amazing what people don't want to know.

Rated 4 out of 5 stars

02/20/23

Full Review

Audience Member

When his aged grandmother dies, Arnon Goldfinger and his family need to clear her flat of over half a century's worth of collected possessions. What they unearth amongst her papers astonishes and puzzles them and so Goldfinger sets out to solve a mystery that the family never suspected. This brilliant documentary leads a man on a journey of discovery about his family and to some unexpected and difficult interviews with people who knew his grandparents. All families keep secrets and here we see a fascinating account of what happens when these secrets are gradually uncovered. The fact that Arnon Goldfinger manages to do so sensitively and daringly is a great testament to his skill. There is no blame or accusation or sensationalism, just a desire to uncover the truth and find out what really happened to bring his grandparents from Berlin to Tel Aviv. It was particularly moving to see the effect of this gradual unearthing has on Goldfinger's mother who clearly had no real idea of significant aspects of her own past but, after some initial denial, deals with them with grace and strength.

Rated 4.5 out of 5 stars

01/13/23

Full Review

Audience Member

Hard to understand this documentary.. not because of the film, but because of the content... Jews that are friends with SS officer? guess it comes down to human nature, and wanting to accept a person as an individual...

Rated 3 out of 5 stars

01/17/23

Full Review

Audience Member

A very interesting movie, raising lots of questions about guilt, how to deal with one's family's history, and how to understand one's family within history.

Rated 4 out of 5 stars

02/14/23

Full Review

Audience Member

What makes this documentary so revealing and intriguing is not so much the mystery that Goldfinger tries to uncover or its shocking implications but all the collective propensity of second-generation Jews and Germans to close their eyes and leave the past and secrets behind.

Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars

02/14/23

Full Review

walter m

A lot of families have skeletons in their closets. For Arnon Goldfinger(?!?), after his grandmother dies, he finds quite a few creepy looking mink stoles in her closet in her apartment in Israel. On a more metaphorical level, he discovers a friendship his grandparents had with a senior SS officer not only before World War II, but after. To be honest, that's not as weird as it sounds. That's for the simple reason that emigrants tend to identify more with the country they came from, then the one they move to, as his grandparents continued to speak German after they arrived in Israel, never learning to speak Hebrew.(As he recalled in his autobiography, Kirk Douglas remembers hearing German songs when he was filming on location in Israel which made him very, very angry.) At least, Arnon is in the right neighborhood when he talks about generational differences, even as he cannot truly overcome the home movie aesthetics of his documentary "The Flat."

Rated 3 out of 5 stars

03/31/23

Full Review

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Arnon Goldfinger

Director

Axel Milberg

Narrator

Arnon Goldfinger

Screenwriter

Arnon Goldfinger

Producer

Thomas Kufus

Producer

Yoni Rechter

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Synopsis

Cleaning out an apartment leads to unexpected discoveries and repressed family emotions coming to the surface.

Director: Arnon Goldfinger
Screenwriter: Arnon Goldfinger
Distributor: IFC Films
Genre: Documentary
Original Language: Hebrew
Release Date (Theaters): Oct 19, 2012, Limited
Release Date (Streaming): Jan 1, 2017
Box Office (Gross USA): $467.0K
Runtime: 1h 37m

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