European journalist Cordelia Edvardson has had a remarkable life worthy of a fine documentary. But that film is not likely to be made, now that Swedish documentary filmmaker Stefan Jarl has sacrificed an accurate portrait of Edvardson for his political agenda.
“The Girl From Auschwitz” aspires to refract the life of a Holocaust survivor through a prism of contemporary social justice. The idea isn’t bad, but unfocused execution results in a muddled blend of wartime remembrance and political commentary.
The film will have its U.S. premiere Saturday, Oct. 8, in the Mill Valley Film Festival.
Edvardson’s story emerges in bits and pieces: She survived Auschwitz as a child, landed on a train to Denmark after the liberation of the camp and grew up in Sweden. She enjoyed a successful career as a journalist and author but felt a creeping complacency. The sense that the issues she was covering were pedestrian compared to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict impelled her to immigrate to Israel.
She’s a columnist, rather than a correspondent, for a Stockholm paper. She provides opinion and analysis rather than straight reporting.
Unfortunately, the film gives us barely a glimpse of Edvardson at work. Jarl provides some perfunctory interviews with Swedish peers and editors to make the case that she’s a topnotch journalist, but we rarely see her on the beat.
What seems to have attracted the filmmaker to his subject, other than knowing and respecting Edvardson for years, is her record of criticizing Israeli policy. Although she says that she condemns the Palestinian leadership in equal measure, Jarl takes a one-sided view.
He does show us — a la snapshot TV journalism — a checkpoint, a Palestinian house being bulldozed, a refugee camp and the erection of the security barrier (which is twice as tall as the Berlin Wall). The effects of these measures, on both Palestinians and Israelis, have been documented in far greater detail in a number of other documentaries.
But Jarl isn’t exploring an issue so much as holding up a Holocaust survivor as an arbiter of morality. If Edvardson objects to Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, what more is there to say?
Edvardson may have strong opinions in print, but she’s no fist-waver. Her experiences in Auschwitz shaped her, and she leaves it at that.
“What I identify most with are the humiliations,” she says, referring to the checkpoints and other tactics. “If you have total power, you become totally corrupt.”
That’s unambiguous, but it’s the only such statement Edvardson makes in the course of the film. Overall, one gets the sense that “The Girl From Auschwitz” reflects Jarl’s view of Israel more than Edvardson’s.
And what about her recollections of the camps? They provide the documentary’s most revealing moments, even though they are mostly presented in long, static chunks with the silver-haired, Swedish-speaking Edvardson seated at a table.
“In Auschwitz, I think I withdrew more and more into myself. You sort of make yourself autistic, practically,” she confides with a short, shy laugh.
A child who sought to be invisible grew up to have her name and picture in the paper on a regular basis. But giving voice to the disenfranchised, which is one function of journalists, is not the same thing as asserting moral superiority. Stefan Jarl thinks it is.
“The Girl From Auschwitz” screens 3 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 8, at the Smith Rafael Film Center in San Rafael. Tickets: $8-$10. (925) 866-9559 or www.mvff.com.