"The Flat": filmmaker's late grandmother's apartment in Israel unveils a family secret regarding a member of the SS

Documentary filmmaker Arnon Goldfinger finds that his own family generates an intriguing story after his grandmother dies in Tel Aviv at age 98.  As the autobiographical film "The Flat" begins,.the family moves in, ready to sort through the apartment and dispose of tremendous amounts of stuff.  I wonder if this will happen when I am gone.  People who live alone often do set up mysteries for others to plow through after their gone.  In my case, that would include a digital legacy. 

  

Pretty soon Arnon unpeels the onion layers of his grandmother’s life,  he discovers that his grandparents had a friendship with German SS officer Leopold Midlenstein even before World War II.  He travels to Holland and Germany, where the film ends in a cemetery in a thunderstorm.  On a personal level, were members of the Nazi establishment always “bad people”?  Perhaps the film anticipates the idea behind Stephen Spielberg’s “Schindler’s List”.

  

  

The official site is here. The 2011 film can be rented on YouTube (through IFC) for $2.99, or from Netflix.

The film is in English, Hebrew, and German.

For today’s short film, I recommend “Travel Inside a Black Hole” on YouTube (10 min), here,    I don’t know who the speaker is. It’s hard to summarize what he says.  It’s all relative.  Perhaps at death one’ soul goes inside a black hole and time stops, and one can “see” everything just before going in. 

  

Wikipedia attribution link for Tel Aviv skyline picture.