Note: Axel Corti will appear in person March 29 following Santa Fe, the second film in his trilogy which concludes with Welcome in Vienna, March 31. "November 10, 1938, the morning after 'Crystal Night' in Vienna, when Austrian Jews were compelled to escape their own country. Ferry is a Jewish youth whose father is beaten up and killed by the SA. And so he makes his way to Prague, and thence by way of Paris to Marseilles, and the prospect of a boat out of Europe. In this first part of the magnificent Where To and Back? trilogy, Austrian director Axel Corti and writer Georg Stefan Troller introduce us to their way of looking at people under stress. Just as they make a seamless match of original newsreel and their own black-and-white reconstruction, so they reassess the 'old' story of Nazi and Jew by concentrating on the ways in which ordinary people respond to the pressure. And in Armin Mueller-Stahl's performance as a German soldier who chose to oppose Nazism, they teach us the height of realism and emotional resonance they are searching for. So begins the trilogy that is one of the great achievements of modern cinema from a Viennese director in the tone of von Stroheim, Fritz Lang, Preminger and Billy Wilder." David Thomson