DOCWORLD FILM FUND
in collaboration with the Dr. David M. Milch Foundation
Our Mission
The Dr. David M. Milch Foundation, via its DocWorld Film Fund initiative, believes in the power of storytelling. We support documentaries which explore and encourage deeper knowledge and understanding of the Holocaust and Jewish cultural history. We are grounded in our commitment to Tikkun Olam, creatively contributing to "healing the world" through artistic expression that reflects the vitality and richness of our heritage, its connections with the communities we live within, and fosters thoughtful healthy change shared by all.
OUR FILMS
A selection of collaborations between DocWorld and the Dr. David M. Milch Foundation
A SURVIVOR'S JOURNEY:
THE LUSIA MILCH STORY
Director Julia Mintz
Lusia’s journey to survive began at just 10 years old with the rumbling of German army trucks rolling into her home town. Within 72 hours, murderous pogroms were committed, her community was at the mercy of Nazi soldiers determined to carry out Hitler’s Final Solution and her family was brutally murdered. Now a young orphan with only the clothes on her back, she escaped Nazi slaughter. Lusia’s long journey continued across war-torn Europe, facing dangerous border checkpoints and bravely crossing the Alps on foot until she reached the shores of Italy. There, she would board a passenger ship to a country she would soon call her home.
AFTER THE FINAL NO
Director Phyllis Lee
A Jewish displaced-persons camp in US-occupied Germany (1945-1957) proves to be a crucible in which an astonishing human capacity for resilience and post-traumatic growth emerges. Stateless survivors of the Holocaust undergo tremendous personal and societal transformations in a temporary Shtetl created in the heart of the Nazi stronghold.
FAMILY TREASURES LOST AND FOUND
Director Karen A. Frenkel
This documentary is a model to help people access online and real-world archives and genealogy resources and enrich their understanding of the Holocaust’s direct and indirect impact. Journalist Karen A. Frenkel is the daughter of Holocaust survivors. Her mother spoke of her wartime ordeal, but her father was silent. Karen embarked on a five-year quest to fill in the gaps, honor her parents and lost relatives, and ensure that memories would endure. This became an exciting detective story to better understand silence and loss.
FOUR WINTERS
Director Julia Mintz
Despite extraordinary odds, over 25,000 Jewish partisans fought back against the Nazis and their collaborators from the forests of WWII’s Belarus and Eastern Europe. These determined men and women, many barely in their teens, engaged in acts of sabotage; blowing up trains, burning electric stations, and attacking armed enemy headquarters. Shattering the myth of Jewish passivity, the last surviving partisans tell their stories of resistance in FOUR WINTERS, revealing a stunning narrative of heroism and resilience.
CHILDREN OF THE INQUISITION
Director Joseph Lovett
Children of the Inquisition: Their stories can now be told challenges our long-held ideas of history as it reveals the family secrets of the people who were forced to convert or flee during the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions (1478-1834). The stories are told by their descendants, many of whom are just discovering the ancient Jewish roots of their families threatened by the fires of the Inquisition.
OUT OF EXILE
Directors Dawn Freer and Peter Stein
Out of Exile – the Photography of Fred Stein is the tale of a man caught up in one of history’s darkest moments. The Nazi menace thrust Fred Stein into a life of exile: in 1930s Paris; across the war-torn French countryside; and in 1940s New York. Always full of belief in the human spirit, his answer was to create thousands of brilliant photographs, an art that transcends bigotry.
PLUNDERER
Director Hugo Macgregor
The restoration of the arts in Germany and Europe from the 1940s to the present, a relatively ignored chapter in post-Holocaust history, will be explored in Plunderer (formerly Restitution: Art and Memory).
One strand will focus on a Jewish family, following their lives and attempts to reclaim art stolen by the Nazis in an effort to reconnect with their culture and identity. A second strand will focus on ex-Nazis who formed a clandestine art-network in the 1940s.