User Reviews

"Die Hälfte der Stadt" or "Half the Town" is a German documentary that is in all kinds of languages and was released back in 2015 as the maybe most significant career effort by writer and director Pawel Siczek until this point. Last night I was lucky enough to watch the film at a showing closely linked to a Polish Film Festival here in Berlin. Or maybe now that I have seen it, maybe I am not so sure anymore if I would say "lucky enough". But first things first. The title of the film is a reference to the Polish town of Kozienice and how it was divided between Germans and Polish people during World War II with particular focus on photographer Chaim Berman and his works that play a major role from start to finish here. There is one crucial component that will be a positive or negative deal breaker here for many. And that is the fact that really a lot of the film is animated, namely the flashback sequences and it is not just 2 or 3 occasions, it is very frequently. There were people in my audience who said it was too harmless given the subject, while others really appreciated them. I myself struggled a lot with these, especially with the quantity, which was very often, especially early on and also included moments that just felt not really necessary to me to be included like that. Of course, that is also a great deal of subjective perception. In any case, I felt that this frequent use hurt the movie overall too and the transition between these animated scenes and the live action documentary scenes felt not really as smooth as I would have liked it to be. And that added up to my criticism that the live action documentary scenes in the now also suffered from it and rarely evoked the motion that I hoped I would feel while watching. If I could choose, it would have been perfectly fine to do the film without animated scenes at all, maybe the better decision, and completely rely on spoken memories or maybe also a narrator instead, even if the film maybe would have been 75 minutes long only because of that. Nonetheless, I must say that there were still some very good moments from the documentary perspective, especially in the last third of the film. So yes this is a movie where it is not too difficult to appreciate it and maybe also forget about many of the mediocrities early on because the longer it goes, the more memorable it becomes, also in terms of the animated scenes. The final one for example at the church where the old Jewish man is forced to cross himself at gunpoint was one I liked a lot and if there were really only 2 or 3 of these itcould have been an amazing addition. About that particular scene, there is also a huge irony to this scene as the Nazi officer still kills the man in cold blood given the reference to God and how one commandment, maybe the most crucial of them all, is that "Thou shalt not kill". But still, in the fasce of my criticisms about the animated sequences and how they also take out the flow of the overall film, I must say eventually that the ways in which the (very likable) director elaborated on the movie and why he made such a creative choice, namely by referring drawings and paintings by Holocaust survivors, made a great deal of sense to me. Oh well, maybe my dislike is actually entirely subjective here. But for me, it had such a negative impact that I would not want to watch the film anytime soon again.