“I did like Hitler, but it is forgotten.” The Day I Met Hitler is a documentary film made over five years (2015-2020) by Toronto-based Ronen Israelski. The film has simple narration and a personal homage and fact-finding for a director and artist whose life and course of his family still to the date is tied to the past and horror of WWII. The Award winner in Canadian Cinematography Awards and selected for other nominations recently, The Day I MET HITLER uses the medium of cinema and personal storytelling to uncover facts hidden in the weight of history.
The film is a series of interviews with still survivors who personally met Hitler. The director’s journey and film opening begin in Berlin and the site where his father met Hitler in 1934. The camera’s bird’s view shows us Berlin, the city long recovered but still haunted by the memory of a man and a regime that shook the core of who we are. His search in Berlin leads the director to his father’s apartment and the Jewish cemetery that his grandmother is buried. The image is so revelatory, and the shifting of time-space smooth and not disconcerting. The film and camera then take the viewers back to Canada, back to Austria, and eventually to Berlin. In all episodes, a sense of tragic loss and unfathomable insights into how Nazism and Hitler swayed the hearts of those who met him, and the general public is frighteningly evident. The interviews with Richard Reiter, Gerhard Bartles, and the unsuccessful and fleeting one with Edda Goring all attempt to cover the gaps and make us not hate Hitler more but to understand how through cinema’s language, one can understand the horror and complexity of past historical trauma.
As the protagonist and someone who dares to ask questions, Israelski is relentlessly after the truth. His quest into what attracted people into Hitler, why he needed a poster boy, and Hitler’s propaganda machine are all noteworthy for future documentary filmmakers. The image of Edda Goring, who refuses the interview but caught accidentally in front of the camera, exposes the power of cinema not to twist the truth and reality as Leni Riefenstahl did but to bring to light the reality hidden visually and aurally after almost 70 years. The camera is as much as critical and exposing but at the same time objective. One may argue that the film takes a side on the event of Jewish community horror and judgment over Hitler’s historical role on monumental atrocities, but it acts very neutral, and the research and scope of dialogues reinforce this aspect. Hitler as shown to be a lover of nature and kids but his dark side and responsibility in horror unquestionable.
“I was blinded by him, I never knew that Jews were systematically killed..”- “Did you ever kill a Jew yourself?…”; “To the best of our knowledge, these subjects were the last living people in the world who met Hitler in person.” Through these additions, the film, voice-over, subtitles, and music make us reimagining the past in the present in light of the coming future. The song that the Nazis jokingly sang in the concentration camps could have been forgotten. However, Israeliski’s film unburies it and forces the viewer to contemplate broader human conditions of regrets, responsibility, and present haunted by the past and impact of personal charisma waning in the post-modern period.
Grade: A
© 2020. UniversalCinema Mag.