Commemorating Holocaust Remembrance Day, 50 Children: The Rescue Mission of Mr. & Mrs. Kraus, the new documentary by Steve Pressman, recounts the story of Eleanor and Gilbert Kraus. Some may know of this Philadelphia couple who helped rescue, as the moving film’s title indicates, fifty young children out of Austria during the Nazi occupation in 1939. Six-time Emmy-winner Alan Alda narrates the harrowing work, which also includes readings from Eleanor’s journals – a precious artifact – by the actress Mamie Gummer. (Pressman and Alda were also on-hand at a preview screening last week in the HBO building to celebrate the film.)

The documentary chronicles, with clear-eyed narrative, the hurdles the Krauses encountered both from the American government as wells as in Berlin and Vienna, where the Jewish couple had to go to complete their rescue act. As much recent literature has pointed out, then-president Franklin Roosevelt was not completely for saving the Jewish prisoners under Nazi rule. 50 Children also examines the anti-Semitism prevalent in the United States at that time. The Krauses also encountered fellow Jews angry at them for rocking the boat instead of remaining still and silent.

The most harrowing moments in the Pressman’s film arrive when the Krauses do in Austria: taking the children from their parents was a necessary evil. Losing their children meant hopefully saving their lives. To Pressman’s credit, he maintains the complete pathos of this situation without ever veering into manipulative territory. Nine of the surviving children – now septuagenarians and octogenarians – are also interviewed in 50 Children. They recognize that the Krauses gave them life, and remind us that rescue missions involve two parties – those who must escape to survive, and those more fortunate ones willing to take them in (we New Yorkers were recently reminded of this at a more local level during and after Hurricane Sandy just last fall). There are many messages to be found in this worthy doc, but that one that rings the clearest is this reminder: we’re all in this together.

Further information about 50 Children can be found at www.hbo.com.

What does the term “warbler” mean to you?

No, it’s not a rival a cappella team from Glee – they’re birds! Warblers are an exotic species, one of the 117 chronicled by Jeffrey Kimball in his understated documentary Birders: The Central Park Effect. Birders, filmed over the course of a year, documents New York bird watchers in their own natural habitat. And while it, yes, introduces average viewers to appreciation of both a hobby and a part of nature, it is also a fascinating cross-section of a sector of New York life: those who escape Gotham’s hustle and bustle by running inward.

Birders, commissioned by HBO, begins in springtime, when the park’s bird population multiplies to include the many flyers migrating from Central and South America. One watcher describes a “unicorn effect,” in which they get to see birds about which they have predominantly only read, that have taken on a mythological status. Initially, Kimball focuses on the watchers, as they explain how they got turned on to watching in the first place. For some, a relative or girlfriend introduced them to the habit. Others say that for them, Central Park provides a refuge away from the noise and the crowds of Manhattan streets without forcing them to outright leave the city. It is an active way of observing the slow-moving beauty of nature, and suits their personalities. One person interviewed for the doc, Chris Cooper (not the Oscar-winning actor) says that most birders are collectors and listers in life, and watching falls under that umbrella of completest observation.

But then Kimball begins to pour on the facts, some of which are quite harrowing: of the ten million birds that migrate to the Andes every fall, only eight million will make. And then only five million will still have survived into the spring. Imagine losing half of your family between Labor Day and Easter every year. We learn birder jargon: a “CAGU” is a California gull, and an “LBJ” is a small, obscure brown bird; a peep, meanwhile, is a small shorebird. Birders operate in the off-hours, and have been known to disappear from their friends from March to May. While they tuck their pants in under their socks to prevent Lyme disease, those birders who have gotten beam at their avocational hazard.

And the human subjects of Kimball’s documentary, often speaking in the hushed tones and patient cadences of watchers, benefit from Kimball’s own love of the subject. When Starr Saphir, a New Yorker in her seventies who has made a living giving bird tours through Central Park (we first meet her as she explains tough times have forced her to up her fee from $6 to $8), learns of a terminal breast cancer diagnosis, her love of birds allows her put the news in perspective. She is a part of nature, just like the birds. Kimball skirts condescension or any kind of subjective personal commentary when portraying her in these moments. He does the same with esteemed novelist Jonathan Franzen, who has written several essays about his love for birding. Referring to a tableau in which birds dot all the trees in sight, Franzen posits that it is “one of those rare times in an adult’s life where the world suddenly seems more magical, rather than less.” (Those who have read the author’s Freedom will note that bird watching made its way into the book via the character of Walter.)

Moderation is the key to Birders, which is only an hour long. Even Paul Damian Hogan’s musical score is light and calm, a reflection of those partaking in watching. Kimball never overwhelms the viewers to whom his documentary will serve a primer on the subject. But his view is equally passionate about Central Park itself as it is about the birds. It’s a haven for nature enthusiasts and proves that even in the most concrete jungle of all, there is plenty of room for serenity.

From Kundun to The Hours to The Fog of War, Philip Glass isn’t the type of composer to wed himself to one cinematic genre. Like an actor, Glass noted in a phone interview, he imagines the emotional motivation of the characters, fictional or otherwise, when scoring a film. While working on REBIRTH, the feelings behind this documentary were more accessible for Glass, a longtime Downtown resident.

“There was no difficulty in imagining those emotions. They were immediate and firsthand,” Glass said. “What I noticed was that people put photographs [of their missing loved ones] all over the city…the bottom line is that [the event] was about suffering…human suffering.”

On Sept. 11, 2001, Glass was on tour in Brazil. Many of the musicians he works with, however, were based in Tribeca and had to leave their homes. “Just being able to talk [on the phone] with your family was difficult,” Glass said of the hours and days after the event.

For REBIRTH, instead of creating musical motifs for each of the five subjects chronicled in the film, Glass’ score focused on the passage of time since 9/11.

“The point is almost everybody experiences the same thing. In the first years, it’s all about suffering and loss. Gradually that diminishes…to a place of renewal and living your life again. The rebirth happens to everybody,” Glass noted. “So the music followed the timeline…of how people experienced it.”

Glass hopes the film will be screened and exported widely throughout the world, especially to other regions with a history of recent trauma like Mumbai or South Africa. He points out that the documentary isn’t ideologically or politically motivated, and that the politics surrounding the event aren’t a focus of the work.

“My hope is that when people see this film, they understand that 9/11 was about people,” he noted.

There are documentaries with the power to transcend the silver screen and create lasting, perceptible change in the three-dimensional world. REBIRTH is one such film. A feature-length documentary, REBIRTH is part of a larger organization whose mission is not only to create a historic record of the rebuilding of ground zero but to examine the evolution of grief.

Project Rebirth, the organization, maintains one the largest time-lapse projects, which has chronicled the construction around the ground zero site since 2002. For the film, this footage was intercut with the stories of five people directly affected by 9/11: a survivor who managed to get out of the South Tower of the World Trade Center, a firefighter who lived through the collapse of the WTC but ended up losing his best friend, a high school student whose mother died, a woman who lost her fiancé and a construction worker who is working on the Freedom Tower despite the loss of his brother on 9/11.

Director Jim Whitaker explains the development of the project and how REBIRTH is a meditation on the individual experience of loss Whitaker began his career as a documentary filmmaker to raise money for nonprofit organizations. He wrote and directed Loaded, an award-winning public service announcement against drinking and driving in memory of a Georgetown University classmate.

Our Town Downtown: In October 2001, you visited ground zero for the first time. This visit became the launching point for the Project Rebirth organization and its time-lapse project. What struck you about ground zero when you saw it in person?

Jim Whitaker: The first was a feeling of dread and anxiety as I looked at the debris, the pile and smelled the smells of the site. I watched as a couple of people walked around the site and there was one person wearing a mask. They had this fixed look of determination on their faces. That made me focus on the debris and the fact that one day it would be gone—something else would be in its place. It gave me a sense of hope. That was the inception point: How could you bring that experience of dread, anxiety and hope to an audience?

My first thought was to literally show the rebuilding, to put cameras up for 24 hours a day and allow ground zero and the site to tell its own story.

You have worked in the entertainment industry for many years, but this is your first feature film. [Whitaker serves as the chairman and producer of Whitaker Entertainment at Walt Disney Studios.] When did the idea for the documentary film component of Project Rebirth come about?

I started my career working for a film company that made documentary films for museums. My first thought was that there probably was going to be a museum here. I had the idea of the time-lapse installation with screens surrounding the audience, and the building literally rising up around the audience. I started from a place of wanting to record the history of the site, but as time moved forward, I wanted to record the site and the people. I thought that I should find the human context [of the event].

I read that your field producer, Danielle Beverly, was integral in finding participants for the film and started with 10 interviewees. Did you quickly realize that you needed to winnow down the film to the stories of only five people?

One dropped out after the first year. I went in and edited with all nine people in the film. I would edit each person’s story down to 15- to 30-minute pieces, but intercut [with the time-lapse footage], the film was simple too long. I finally had to make the hard decision to only make it about five people. That decision was made based on where I started: ground zero. The starting place was loss. I felt as though the stories that needed to come to the fore were the ones about the most direct loss.

My mother passed away six months before 9/11. I came into this with a sense of openness and grief. 9/11 was a very different kind of traumatic loss, but how people evolve, manage and move through grief is curious. What I have learned is that it is a very individual and unique experience.

Project Rebirth includes one of the largest time-lapse projects ever undertaken, shot between roughly 2002 and 2009 in 35 mm, with 6 to 14 cameras on site. For this portion of the film, how much footage had to be edited down?

Well, for the time-lapse portion we had more than a million feet of film. The total amount of footage that we shot for the entire film was around 700 hours of film. [B]ut this has been a 10-year process. Everything kind of becomes relative with time.

What do you hope this documentary will help accomplish in a broader sense?

Brian Rafferty [chairman of Project Rebirth] has worked on finding ways to create teaching and learning tools around the film. Apparently, there has never been a record of people going through grief over this length of time. It can help prepare first responders for future events that could occur. There will be a class required of people entering the NYPD academy to see how grief looks, and the process of going through a traumatic experience.

[Since 2007, Project Rebirth has partnered with Georgetown University and Columbia University to create coursework drawn from the film in the fields of human development, psychology, social work and education.]

This film will be part of the permanent installation at the National September 11 Memorial and Museum. What other footage will be part of the exhibit?

The film will play in a regular flow within the museum—in addition, we created what we call “pods,” 10 to 15 minutes versions of each participant’s story. We built the installation similarly to what I had imagined might be possible: we’ll have screens surrounding the audience to show the evolution of the site up to the present day.

REBIRTH is currently showing at the IFC Center (323 6th Ave. at West Third Street.) and will make its television debut on Showtime on Sunday, Sept. 11, at 9 p.m. To read the full version of this interview visit www.otdowntown.com

Odds are that if you live in a major metropolis in the eastern half of the country (or even in Chile), at some point over the last three decades you have stepped on a Toynbee Tile and its cryptic message: “Toynbee Idea in Movie 2001 Resurrect Dead on Planet Jupiter.” For most people, the tiles never register. But for those who did notice them, their provenance and the person behind them became an obsession. Few were more dedicated in their pursuit of the truth than Philadelphian Justin Duerr, the heart of a new documentary about the tiles and the mystery behind them, Resurrect Dead.

Director Jon Foy worked and sleuthed alongside Duerr and amateur detectives Colin Smith and Steve Weinik for almost two years, as they tracked down the flimsiest of leads—clues that led them to everything from a shortwave radio convention to a short David Mamet play. The results are both creepy and compelling, and could possibly put an end to the mystery once and for all. We caught up with Foy over the phone just prior to the film’s Sept. 2 engagement at The IFC Center.

When did you first hear about the Toynbee Tiles?

I was working at a movie theater in 1999 and a friend of mine told me about them, and then I went out and saw one for myself. There was a tile that was right next to the Liberty Bell. Once someone points them out to you, you see them everywhere. In New York, there used to be a lot of good ones, but now there’s just one. [Then] I met Justin in the summer of 2000, and that same night he started showing me photographs of tiles and telling me about them. That planted the seed in my head to make a documentary. So that was something I filed away in the back of my mind. Eventually, I was going to film school in the summer of 2005 in Austin, Texas, and I decided it was a good time to make this movie.

How long did you work on Resurrect Dead?

We started shooting summer 2005 and the present-tense part of the story, which would be acts two and three, took place from summer 2005 through late 2007. That was the primary footage of the mystery itself. And then I tried to cut a movie out of that and I couldn’t, so I got the guys back in and had these long sit-down interviews and figured out how to tell the story. I wanted to make a verité doc, but it just wasn’t working. We had so many thoughts and leads and hunches that never really panned out, but they were convoluted and we had to go back to find a story.

There’s a pretty dense story, too—a lot of details. As far as putting the story to rest, a lot of it rests on Justin. I think Justin is the character who carries the film emotionally and we care because Justin cares. At the end, Justin does find this kind of revolution.

What do you think about the riffs on the original tiles that are now popping up across the country?

I think it’s awesome. I think the tiler was very much asking people to make tiles. So there are some people who say, “Oh, they’re just copycats,” but I think it’s in line with what he wants. What’s awesome are the Haiti tiles—they look fabulous. And someone just emailed yesterday about tiles in Buffalo. They look great—they’re colorful, they’re artistic. So somebody we’re presuming to be a copycat, we don’t know, has been doing this in complete secrecy for five years now. I can’t even imagine! But there have been a lot of other copies.

Were you surprised that such an esoteric documentary has been so embraced?

I come from this group of starving artists and you don’t foresee things really taking off like this. Really, this all started with Sundance accepting [the film]. And what’s important to realize is that I didn’t show the movie to anyone. By the time I was accepted into Sundance, that was about five and a half years into the process, and I might have shown the movie to, like, 10 people.

There was no way to tell if people would like it. And people need to kind of take a chance to watch this movie. I can’t tell you how many people have said, “It looked strange so I decided to watch it.” Most stuff has a built-in audience, and this movie—it’s an ongoing process just trying to describe what a tile is! It’s really a mystery. I think the better way to pitch the movie to people is that it has this feeling and tone of a strange sci-fi, X-Files sort of thing, and the thing that we’re focusing on will be explained in the movie.

When we started shooting, it was this enormous gamble on my part because I took it for granted that there was going to be this great story behind the tiles and we were going to get it out. And when we started shooting, I remember having a meeting with Colin and thinking, “Where is this even going?” I think that’s when it started sinking in, like, God, I took off from school and moved to another town? It was delusional.

Are you satisfied with the answers the movie provides?

I would say that we came up with a satisfying story. So for me, I’m satisfied enough to move on to something else. But there are still a lot of loose ends. The important thing to tell people is that the story arc in the movie is a satisfying story, but the tiles are bigger than the movie.

Jackson, who lives and works on the Upper West Side, met Linda Fairstein, then the head of the unit, in the mid 1990s and began following her cases.

“It just became an obsession of mine to try to do a film about the unit,” Jackson says. “The fact that it was the first unit in the country; it really is the gold standard. I thought, rape is so chronically underreported that if you showed a portrait of the prosecutors who do take on these crimes that maybe survivors would be more likely to come forward.”

The film highlights the day-to-day work of the prosecutors and follows two cases in particular—a 16-year-old cold case and another recent rape—both brutal crimes. Jackson interviewed the victim of the older case, Natasha Alexenko, and told the story of how her rapist was finally found using DNA evidence.

“I had pretty much closed that chapter in my life,” Alexenko explains in a recent interview. “I had healed and moved on. It was certainly a shock” when they found the perpetrator. She decided to come forward for the film because she wanted to help the prosecutors who had guided her so compassionately through the difficult process of the trial. “I had actually really been inspired by the men and woman that work in the sex crimes unit,” Alexenko says. “I told them I would do anything I could do to help them.”

Jackson spent about a year getting to know Alexenko before she even filmed the interviews with her. She also followed four or five cases simultaneously but could only use footage from trials that had ended by the time the film aired. She shot many scenes from the trial of Kenneth Moreno and Franklin Mata, the NYPD officers recently acquitted of rape, but wasn’t able to include it.

“I don’t know if it would have changed the film” to include that case, Jackson says. “It would have shown how incredibly difficult their job is, often—in a case like that where there was no hard evidence, there were no eyewitnesses.”

The film also illustrates how cases like that would never have made it to trial before New York State reformed its laws in the 1970s. Jackson interviewed former District Attorney Robert Morganthau about his role in changing the way rape was prosecuted. “I went to him and said, everybody’s talking about your legacy— white collar crime, all this stuff—but nobody’s really talking about the jewel in your crown: his incredible mentoring of women and his championing this unit,” Jackson says. “He’s justifiably proud of that unit.”

Jackson also deliberately included snippets of the prosecutors debating the merits of Derek Jeter and swapping stories about their personal lives.

“A film about sexual violence isn’t depressing. It’s full of humor, it’s full of real humanity,” Jackson says. “They may be really driving, obsessed, laser-focused lawyers, but at the same time, they have obsessions with movie stars, they’re huge Yankees fans, they sweat college loans, they worry about their weight.”

They also work extremely hard at a decidedly unglamorous job. Based on popular TV legal dramas, “we have this perception that they’re all sitting in mahogany-lined offices wearing Prada,” Alexenko says. “And that’s very very far from the truth.”

Both Jackson and Alexenko hope that the film will help victims of sexual assault understand what happens when they come forward to report the crimes against them. Alexenko quit her job last year to work fulltime on her foundation, Natasha’s Justice Project, which works closely with the Joyful Heart Foundation, founded by Law & Order: SVU star Mariska Hargitay, to end the national backlog of untested rape kits.

“With my case, the closure I had, I just felt it’s my karmic duty to take the tools, to take my story and help others,” Alexenko says. “There are 180,000 untested rape kits sitting on shelves. We have the means to find these criminals through databases.”

Jackson hopes that viewers will come away with an understanding of how far the legal system has progressed toward helping sexual assault victims, and how hard the sex crimes unit works for justice.

“It’s either happened to one of us, or we know someone it’s happened to,” Jackson says, citing the statistic that one in six women will be the victim of a sexual assault. “I hope that the film brings a new way of looking at the crime itself, and hopefully motivates more women to come forward, more attorneys to dedicate themselves to this kind of law, and really makes the point of the importance of units like this.”

By Armond White

Stonewall Uprising confronts our nonchalant present-day sexual freedoms with the history of struggle that peaked in the 1969 Stonewall riots. Its title asserts uprising (not “riot”) to convey the oppression that gay people had to violently oppose in order to claim their humanity and citizenship. This politically correct correction is subject to the clichés and conventions of all PBS American Experience documentaries (that means droning music, campy archival PSAs and pandering buzzword references to “waterboarding” and “nation of laws” conservatism). Worse, Stonewall Uprising commits an unfortunate revisionism: Every person interviewed in the doc refocuses that legendary civil disobedience at the Stonewall Inn as a homogeneously white, mostly male memory. Stonewall Uprising’s history is gentrified history.

An “uprising” that sure looks like a riot. Photo by Bettye Lane.

It is a cultural tragedy that film critics, curators and even historians like the makers of Stonewall Uprising, have neglected the 1995 drama Stonewall. As directed by the late Nigel Finch and written by Rikki Beadle-Blair, Stonewall was derived from historian Martin Duberman’s authoritative account, which detailed the unpopular fact that the uprising was largely sparked by black and Latino drag queens. But when a white, straight-appearing survivor tells Stonewall Uprising’s directors, Kate Davis and David Heilbroner, “The police ran from us, the lowliest of the low, and it was fantastic,” the white talking head becomes a form of cultural appropriation—history usurped by the winners.

Davis and Heilbroner spend more time setting the un-P.C. scene of pre-Stonewall shame, bigotry and repression than they do defining the political dynamics of the era’s agitated gay community. And their summary too-briefly describes the origin of the gay liberation march, now the annual gay pride parade. Some personal testimonies are insightful (playwright Doric Wilson saying, “People thought we were these homosexual monsters, but oddly enough, we were so innocent and oddly enough so American,” and former NYPD Inspector Seymour Pine saying, “You know they broke the law, but what kind of law was that?”), yet they create a segregated impression of what was a non-segregated event.

Opening with the specious quote, “Gay bars were to gay people what churches were to blacks in the South,” Davis and Heilbroner prove tactless and naïve about the legacy of oppression. They forget their own premise that the uprising was indeed a civil rights movement. Thankfully, music video director Joseph Kahn corrects Davis and Heilbroner’s blundering in his relevant new Kylie Minogue video “All The Lovers.”

Kahn fantasizes a street scene—what in the ’60s was called a “happening”—where Kylie’s diva entreaty rounds up multicultural, ambisexual legions to join her individual ecstasy. It’s not a riot, not an orgy, it’s an uprising as the swaying lovers amass and their joy takes them literally higher and higher.

I was uncertain about the verity of the video’s exultant open-arms sexuality until Davis and Heilbroner’s error made me see that Kahn had shrewdly/ingeniously realized the uprising as Finch, Blair and Duberman understood it. Kahn’s floating marshmallows, balloons and white stallions do not make up for the inequities of gay socialization; rather, they anthropomorphize Kahn and Kylie’s idea of purity. Better than the gay exploitation of Sex and the City 2, Kahn’s video transforms those urban spaces—“All the dirty, despicable places” as a Stonewall Uprising witness recalls—where gays once were marginalized, pushed to express their sexual needs in the squalid Meatpacking district (now cleaned-up) or the Stonewall Inn itself (which one witness called “a toilet, but it was a temporary refuge from the street”).

Kahn’s gleaming fantasy of paradisiacal urban cleanliness is a creative act that idealizes an historical fact. Like Spencer Tunick, who photographs mass public undressings, Kahn and Kylie emcee a multiracial party; as critic John Demetry points out, restricting participants to the young, pretty, physically fit is part of their idealization. Importantly, Kahn and Kylie serenade their partiers by the Stonewall-era term “lovers” (out-moded by today’s “partner”). Stonewall Uprising is a whitewash; this is a resurrection of affection. Rainbow Pride expressed as Kylie’s bliss.

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Stonewall Uprising
Directed by Kate Davis and David Heilbroner
At Film Forum June 16-29
Runtime: 82 min.