User Reviews

This poignant, award winning German film, documents the lives of HERR (Mr.) ZWILLING and FRAU (Mrs.) ZUCKERMANN, the only two living survivors of the Holocaust in today's Chernowitz, a medium size city now in the Ukraine. The city which was Austrian, then Romanian, before being annexed to the Ukraine after World War II, flourished as a center of Jewish culture (its population was formerly 40% Jewish), for centuries. Today's Jewish life in Chernowitz is chronicled by the two characters. One of the most interesting aspects is that the German language is what bonds Herr Zwilling and Frau Zuckermann.

Probably the best movie released in 1999. In the intention of the director, it should have been a documentary on the Jewish community in Czernowitz in Bucovina, land that in this century has passed from the Austrian Empire to Rumania, occupied by Nazi troops during the war, passed to Soviet Union afterwards and nowadays to Ukraina. Most of these rulers lead an anti-Semitic politics (guess which ones), so that now the Jewish community is reduced to very few survivors. But when the director met Mr. Zwilling, a 70-year-old teacher in the local school and his friend, Ms. Zuckermann, a 90-year-old retired teacher, he realized that they were interesting people in themselves, not only in what they represented. That is where the force of the movie lies: the only thing the director does is letting a cameraman follow Mr. Zwilling who shows us the only Jewish remains in Czernowitz and who visits Ms. Zuckermann every evening. And the dialogues between the optimistic Ms. Zuckermann (who lost all her relatives in a lager and nevertheless says "Well, now we have no more Hitler, no more Stalin...") and the pessimistic Mr. Zwilling ("Yes, but this winter will be very cold!") are full of so much wit and life that should be studied by lots of professional screenwriters... Unfortunately such a film, shot in several languages, the most important of them German, the language the two old people use to talk to each other, will remain in the German territory and won't go probably abroad: the only hope is that it will be discovered by some cine-clubs...