Arts Entertainment

At The Movies

` Fighte r'

Screening Monday at the DFT, film follows feisty survivors as they revisit their wartime past.

The men wander
through the remnants of
the Theresienstadt
Ghetto, where Wiener's
mother was beaten to
death and Lustig survived,
while the Nazi propagan-
da film The Fuhrer Gives a

City to the Jews plays in

ironic counterpoint.
There is high drama,

TOM TUGEND

Special to the Jewish News

111 gybe heroes should be watched from a
distance. They're important in time of
war but not so comfortable in time of
peace," Arnost Lustig muses toward
a documentary that will be
Fighter,
the end of
screened Jan. 28 at the Detroit Film Theatre.
Lustig is talking about Jan Wiener, the film's title
character and his traveling companion in a journey
back in time and space to the stations of the
Holocaust, which both survived.
The two old men, both full of life and memories,
make for an odd couple and a riveting film.
Wiener, 78 when the film was made in the summer
of 1998, is strikingly handsome, with snowy hair and
a martial moustache. He still works out regularly as a
boxer, and is a man of action, straightforward, pro-
pelled by enduring loves and hates.
Lustig, then 72, is balding and paunchy, a success-
ful author, academic and bon vivant, who looks for
underlying motivations and tries to bend Wiener's
recollections to the literary subtleties of a planned
biography.
One critic described the two men as
"Shakespearean personalities." As they revisit the sites
of Wiener's wartime odyssey through Czechoslovakia,
Slovenia, Yugoslavia and Italy, the protagonists laugh,
drink gallons of beer, quarrel, separate in anger and
reunite.
Pick any emotion, and Fighter has it, often
stretched to the limit of human belief and endurance.
At the railroad station in Trieste, Italy, Wiener
recounts how he clung to the undercarriage of a train
for 18 hours, inches above the wheels and inches
below a toilet chute spewing excrement.

when Wiener guides
Lustig to the office of a
Czech bureaucrat who
humiliated him in 1939
and whom he vowed to
kill after the war.
There is humor: In one
scene, Lustig recalls the
earnest decision of a
group of Czech Jewish
teenagers to lose their vir-
ginity to the same prosti-
Jan Wiener, left and
Arnost Lustig in "Fighter" tute before being deport-
ed.
And there are incidents
even the most fertile imagination could scarcely con-
ceive of.
Lustig recalled that after he arrived at Auschwitz
during the war, he and his companions use a balled-
up rag for a soccer game, with one side of the field
delineated by a high voltage fence.
Asked by one inmate what they thought they were
doing, one boy replied, "We're playing soccer while
we're waiting to die."
Wiener eventually made his way to Italy and
became a bombardier in the Czech wing of Britain's
Royal Air Force. He returned to Prague and, after the
Communists took power, was thrown into a labor

Oak Park

RAXAS

r

fighter director Amir Bar-Lev
spent only the first three
weeks of his life as a Michigan
resident, but he has returned over
his 29 years to visit with family,
including Detroiters Evelyn and
Murray Liberman, who saw
Fighter at the Toronto Film
Festival.
The filmmaker's father, Joshua
Bar-Lev, grew up in Oak Park,
after his parents, Morris and

/

camp for five years as a "British spy"
While Wiener burns with undying hatred of the
Nazis, Lustig reflects, "What would I have done if I
had been born a German boy? How many people
would I have killed? It makes me happy that I was
born a Jew."
In the early 1950s, Wiener and Lustig came to the
United States and since have divided their time teach-
ing in their adopted and native lands.
Amir Bar-Lev, the 29-year old director and co-pro-
ducer of Fighter, is the Michigan-born and Berkeley,
Calif.-raised son of Israelis who came to America in
the early 1950s. He was studying at the Prague Film
Academy in 1993 when he met Wiener, who was
teaching in an exchange program.
Fascinated by the older man's tales of combat,
escape and amorous conquests, he resolved to tell the
survivor's story for his first major film project.
Lustig eagerly joined the trip, and in the summer of
1998 the two "stars" and a five-man crew crammed
themselves and their equipment into a minivan and
took off.
After their return, Bar-Lev had the mammoth job
of editing 100 hours of film into a 90-minute docu-
mentary. With a budget of less than $200,000, the
filmmakers teetered financially on a constant
tightrope.
"We went without salaries, and I moved back into
my parents' home to save money, and used their base-
ment for a cutting room," Bar-Lev recalls.
Fighter has earned a fistful of awards at European
and American film festivals, and enthusiastic reviews
from the New York Times to Variety. 111

The Detroit Film Theatre at the Detroit
Institute of Arts screens Fighter 7:30 p.m.
Monday, Jan. 28. $6. (313) 833-3237.

Rebecca Bar-Lev, moved their
family from Israel to Michigan
in the 1950s. The filmmaker's
grandparents relocated to
California in the 1980s, after
their children settled there.
"My family's experience
around Detroit informed the
film," says the director of
Fighter, who as a newborn lived
in Oak Park. "My grandparents
were an inspiration for the doc-
umentary. It's about the era
when they were in their prime."
Bar-Lev's grandparents were
avid Zionists who served in the
Haganah. They gave up on liv-

ing in Israel after becoming dis-
illusioned with the lifestyle they
encountered on a kibbutz.
The filmmaker, whose father is
a lawyer and whose mother, Beryl,
is a psychologist, is planning for
his next film, which will be a
work of fiction about World War
I. It will not have a Jewish theme.
"I'm looking for the funding,"
says Bar-Lev, a 1994 Brown
University graduate who
majored in film and comparative
mysticism and went on to work
as a film editor to help support
his creative projects.
— Suzanne Chessler