JFF45; Elie Wiesel: Soul on Fire
Part heist film, part probing documentary, director Dan Sturman and screenwriter Gary Gilbert take us on a quest to find stamps pilfered by a Nazi officer and buried in a basement in Legnica, Poland, in The Stamp Thief—a cinematic blend of Argo and The Rape of Europa. Gilbert (a writer for Seinfeld) sets out to find the stamps after hearing the story from his fellow screenwriter, David Weisberg. No writers’ room could invent a more intriguing premise: David’s psychiatrist father, Paul, treated a fireman married to the daughter of the Nazi who allegedly stole the stamps from a concentration camp. Gilbert assembles a crew and gains access to the basement in Legnica by posing as a production team shooting a feature film. The result is a tremendously entertaining film about an eighty-year-old heist, the ethics of misrepresenting the truth in order to do a mitzvah, and the intractable mistrust between some Poles and Jews. —Nancy Fishman
Part heist film, part probing documentary, director Dan Sturman and screenwriter Gary Gilbert take us on a quest to find stamps pilfered by a Nazi officer and buried in a basement in Legnica, Poland, in The Stamp Thief—a cinematic blend of Argo and The Rape of Europa. Gilbert (a writer for Seinfeld) sets out to find the stamps after hearing the story from his fellow screenwriter, David Weisberg. No writers’ room could invent a more intriguing premise: David’s psychiatrist father, Paul, treated a fireman married to the daughter of the Nazi who allegedly stole the stamps from a concentration camp. Gilbert assembles a crew and gains access to the basement in Legnica by posing as a production team shooting a feature film. The result is a tremendously entertaining film about an eighty-year-old heist, the ethics of misrepresenting the truth in order to do a mitzvah, and the intractable mistrust between some Poles and Jews. —Nancy Fishman