CINEMA JUEU 2025
Memory is not merely about remembering: it is about resisting, denouncing, confronting contemporary war crimes, and protecting the dignity of those who suffer. Eighty years ago, the Red Army “liberated” Auschwitz-Birkenau, and the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki brought an end to the Second World War. In the face of nuclear horror and the industrial-scale murder of millions of human beings, the cry of “Never Again” emerged, a demand for memory, justice, and humanity that breaks the silence, challenges impunity, and insists on remembrance.
The millions of human deaths during the Second World War led to the creation of the United Nations and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Yet the Cold War ushered in a new era of global tensions and interventionist policies, generating further war crimes and genocides in different parts of the world, which did not remain in the past but continue to reappear again and again.
Today, in Gaza, civilians endure hunger, constant bombardment, the destruction of their homes, forced displacement, and a lack of access to humanitarian aid. Many families and children remain trapped in confined spaces without safe refuge, struggling each day to survive.
In Ukraine, millions of people suffer from violence: destroyed cities, hunger, and death mark their lives as they strive to protect themselves and defend their culture and identity.
Resistance does not consist of grand heroic feats: heroism lies in the daily effort to survive and maintain dignity in the face of the brutality of war. This everyday dimension, so vividly portrayed in When Lightning Flashes over the Sea by Eva Neyman, is combined with more intellectual, artistic, or even armed forms of resistance. This is evident in Art Spiegelman: Disaster Is My Muse, which explores Spiegelman’s creative trajectory and the power of comics to interpret collective memory, and in Ulica Graniczna by Alexander Ford, one of the first films made after the war and the first feature-length fiction to attempt to represent the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising through the eyes of children and the moral ambiguities of Polish society.
This year’s programme also includes The Commandant’s Shadow by Daniela Völker, which depicts the meeting between Hans Jürgen Höss, son of the Auschwitz commandant, and the survivor Anita Lasker-Wallfisch nearly eighty years later, highlighting the transgenerational scars of war crimes and the importance of preserving memory, as well as Unter den Brettern hellgrünes Gras by Antje Heyn, which transforms the testimony of the Roma survivor Ceija Stojka into a poetic account of memory and resistance against forgetting.
