Acclaimed documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman's first fiction feature is a shattering adaptation of one chapter from
Life and Fate, Soviet war correspondent Vasily Grossman's epic WWII novel of Russian lives upended by the Nazi onslaught. The chapter comprises a single letter, written in 1941 by an elderly Ukranian doctor, Anna, to her son, Vitya, who now lives safely in another city. Anna's letter has been smuggled out of the ghetto in which Anna and the other Jews of her small town have been imprisoned since Nazi troops seized the town. Rumors are swirling among the village's panicked Jews, and Anna understands that her ghetto, like those of Warsaw and L...
Released:
2003
Rated:
NR
Length:
61 mins