2/26/2024 0 Comments Death saved my life on netflix![]() ![]() He does just that with the assistance of the self-appointed investigators who trawled file cabinets and library shelves for proof of Defonseca’s claims – or proof of their falsehood. As long as you’ve delivered everything you know on the subject once all is said and done.” ![]() Along the way, to make the telling more interesting and representative of this story’s themes, I think it’s fair game to hold things back and misdirect the audience. ![]() But in simple terms, for documentary film-making, the viewer needs to leave the cinema – or finish streaming the series, whatever you’re doing – armed with all the information there is to know. “We wanted the film-making to reflect that artifice, and we sought out devices that could assist in that. “We had this idea of folding in untruths to the telling of the story,” he says. The director explains that this ethical quandary “was in the forefront of our minds all along.” He was wary of crossing the line that separates savvy narrative construction from cheap rigging of the game. Though playing his cards close to the vest charged up the excitement of what he calls a “past-tense story,” Hobkinson also recognises that withholding information can be delicate business. I wanted to tell it so that the audience could share in that.” “People went into this blind and unknowing, the friends of Misha and the publishers, and they had a gut-wrenching revelation as the story unfolded. “I wanted to approach this like a thriller director, and for the audience to experience this story as its participants would have,” Hobkinson says. He reveals critical facts at the same pace that they were uncovered at the time, leaning into the natural suspense that Misha could only invent. While dissecting that paradoxical phenomenon of believing the unbelievable, his film doubles as tense reportage tracing the trail of the genealogists and other self-appointed quasi-detectives as they sniff out the facts. I researched more and more into the background of this trial and couldn’t believe the story I’d happened upon.” “And in the age of fake news, when truth is a slippery concept, this would be particularly fitting. It took the shape of a documentary about storytelling itself, in a way. “It was about the ongoing court case in Massachusetts, into the tail end of this whole thing, and this struck me as fascinating, insofar as it was a look into how and why we believe things we are told to be true. “Six years ago, I came across this whole affair in a small article in a British newspaper,” Hobkinson told the Guardian from his home in London. Sam Hobkinson, director of the new Netflix documentary Misha and the Wolves, was instantly intrigued by Defonseca’s tale and the layers of meta-narrative surrounding it, like a gobstopper of deception. Misha: a Mémoire of the Holocaust Years was a runaway success, complete with a co-sign from Oprah, a French film adaptation and a prospective adaptation deal with Disney.īut as suspicions over veracity arose and nudged her words from incredible to not-credible, everything would soon come undone in swift and embarrassing fashion, leading to years of legal battles and millions in fines. Her life story had all the tragedy and triumph of a film or a novel or, as fellow Beth Torah congregant and publisher Jane Daniel would soon persuade her, a memoir. She spun an extraordinary yarn recounting her childhood years, from fleeing her home in Belgium after the Nazis apprehended her resistance-fighter parents, to a grueling odyssey on foot across occupied Europe, to an interlude living feral under the tutelage of a wild wolfpack.
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