When “Swastika” was shown at the 1973 Cannes film festival, fights broke
out and somebody threw part of a chair at the screen.“All hell broke
loose,” says the film’s Australian-born, Los Angeles-based director
Phillipe Mora. “There were eruptions all through the theatre. Finally
they stopped the film and a French guy came out, looking like a head
waiter and said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, this is the Cannes film
festival, not a beer hall.” The cause of the ruckus was, primarily, that
the film appeared to humanise Adolf Hitler and his inner circle.
Never-seen-before colour footage, shot mostly by Hitler’s mistress Eva
Braun, showed the personification of evil cuddling his dog, playing with
children and discussing “Gone with the Wind.”
The revival of
“Swastika,” championed by the German documentary director Ilona Ziok, is
a sign, Mora says, that Germany has matured in how it handles its Nazi
legacy. After the Berlin screening, a German film producer effusively
told Mora, a Jew whose father was born in Leipzig, that “Swastika”
should be shown in every school. “The film was made under the assumption
that everybody knew Hitler was a monster and a murderer. I didn’t
realise it was open to debate,” he says. “But he was a man with a mother
and a father and sisters and a pet dog. And that viscerally disturbed
people. They had only seen Hitler ranting and raving in grainy black and
white film. It took 30 years but now a new generation is interested.”
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