Worldwide screening – 100 Cinemas remember Bruno Schulz Sunday

2017 is the year of the 125th birthday and the 75th anniversary of Bruno Schulz's assassination (1892 – 1942). The writer and painter, he was born as an Austrian, lived as a Pole and died as a Jew. He gained reputation in Poland with his story collections The Street of Crocodiles and Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass. Bruno Schulz is considered to be one of the most influential, but barely known writers of the 20th Century. His magnum opus The Messiah is still lost. 

In 1942 under German occupation Bruno Schulz had to make several murals as the Leibjude for the Viennese SS-Hauptscharführer and Blutordensträger Felix Landau. Worldwide screening – 100 Cinemas remember Bruno Schulz has the goal to create an international and interrelated remembrance work, which gives the opportunity to tribute one of the most influential but hardly known Polish-Jewish painters and writers (translated into 39 languages) of the 20th Century and his tragic fate under the terror of German occupation in the Galician city of Drohobycz in 1941-42. 

On Sunday, November 19, 2017, on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of Bruno Schulz's assassination, the award-winning documentary Finding Pictures will be screened all over the world, exactly fifteen years after his world premiere at the Center for Jewish History in New York City. Finding Pictures will be presented in 11 languages in over 80 cities in Austria, Brazil, Czech Republic, Ecuador, Germany, Israel, Italy, Macedonia, Mexico, Netherlands, Poland, Russia, Spain, Switzerland, Ukraine and the United States. 

Finding Pictures - Synopsis Bruno Schulz, the world-renowned writer and painter and a Polish Jew, experienced the terror of German occupation in the Galician city of Drohobycz in 1941-42. He initially survived by painting murals for the children of the SS officer Felix Landau, on the nursery walls of the villa they had occupied. Bruno Schulz was shot and killed by the SS on November 19, 1942. Despite an intensive search after WWII, his murals were not found until February 9, 2001, when the documentary filmmaker Benjamin Geissler discovered the long-lost pictures. In May 2001, representatives of Jerusalem’s Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial removed fragments of these murals from Ukraine, sparking an international controversy. Finding Pictures documents the search, the discovery and sudden disappearance of the Bruno Schulz murals. Yad Vashem has claimed the moral right to preserve the works. Ukrainian and Polish officials say the removal was a crime. But what do the Jews from Drohobycz say? This film enables viewers to follow the director through a meticulously composed mosaic of both known and unpublished testimonies about Bruno Schulz and his last days.

Program
19 November 2017 (16:00)