Stuart Sender’s 2003 Oscar-nominated documentary, “Prisoner of Paradise,” zeroes in on two grievous decisions that the popular German Jewish actor and director Kurt Gerron made after the Nazis gained power.
The first was not to flee Europe. The second, after Gerron was arrested and interned at Theresienstadt, was to direct a propaganda film for the Nazis.
“Gerron was part of a thriving German cultural scene, rivaling the explosion of culture and film in New York,” explains Sender, a veteran producer and director of television documentaries. “He was also a decorated war hero. The powerful identity of being German over being Jewish was one part” of his decision not to emigrate in the 1930s.
Unfortunately, Gerron allowed his popularity and stardom to insulate him from reality. “As long as he was working,” Sender says, “he could become kind of blind.”
“Prisoner of Paradise” will play at the Balboa Theater in San Francisco on Sunday, Nov. 21. Sender, an East Coast native who graduated from U.C. Santa Cruz and has been based in Los Angeles for the last decade, will be at Balboa to field questions after the ll a.m. showing.
While Gerron helped friends like Peter Lorre get to America, he chose to stay.
“He seems to have had at least three or four opportunities where people reached out to him,” Sender relates. “It speaks powerfully to how unimaginable this fate was to some people. That’s what was heartbreaking about his story.”
Banned in Berlin, Gerron found work in France, Italy and finally Holland before the Nazis sent him to Theresienstadt, near Prague. It was there that he agreed to direct “The Fuehrer Gives the Jews a City,” a speciously sunny portrait of the camp.
“I don’t think we come down in any way that he shouldn’t have made the film,” muses Sender, who produced the documentary with longtime colleague Malcolm Clarke.
Gerron “was given an offer he couldn’t refuse. There was a level of enthusiastic cooperation that may have slid over the line into collaboration that makes us incredibly uncomfortable.”
Gerron believed his celebrity would keep him alive, but after the film’s completion, in 1944 he was put on the last transport to Auschwitz, where he was murdered.
“I think the larger question is who of us really has the vista or the perspective to know when we are standing in the middle of history?” Sender says. “Gerron’s dilemma still continues to strike a chord with people. In asking if he should have made the film, we don’t have to put ourselves in his shoes to ask, ‘What kind of choices do I make about my life and who I am in the world?'”
Sender and Clarke employed almost no footage of the Holocaust in “Prisoner of Paradise,” which premiered locally in the Mill Valley Film Festival last year.
“This film is not about the death camps,” Sender says, “but about the diabolical thinking that goes into it — the misuse not only of people, but of images and their power, and of the truth. The Nazis were the first to understand the power of this new medium. And while a lot of their propaganda may look crude to us now — crude and coarse and ugly — it was very, very powerful and people
hadn’t seen it before.”
“Prisoner of Paradise,” Sunday, Nov. 21, at 11 a.m., at the Balboa Theatre, 3630 Balboa St. at 38th Avenue, S.F. (415) 221-8184 or www.balboamovies.com.