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Interesting film at Jewish Museum in NY

The Jewish Museum in NY is currently showing a film by Dani Gal, an Israeli artist who lives and works in Berlin. The film, As from Afar,  deals with the unlikely friendship of Simon Wiesenthal and Albert Speer, who was a minister of Armaments and War Production in the Third Reich.  Speer, who accepted moral responsibility for his conduct in the Nuremberg trials,  was sentenced to 20 years in prison. Speer first wrote to Wiesenthal in 1974, after his release from prison, as part of his effort to accept some responsibility for his war crimes. As Joanna Montoya Robotham, the Neubauer Family Foundation Assistant Curator put it, the film, based in part on the book
Simon Wiesenthal: The Life and Legends by the Israeli historian Tom Segev, combines use of cinematic techniques and documentary material to explore the complex processes of inclusion and exclusion involved in the construction of historical memory
and how cataclysmic events such as the Holocaust are recalled, recorded, and distorted.

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