“At once intimate and epic and an impeccable period re-creation, Where To and Back is a masterpiece.”-Kevin Thomas, Los Angeles Times
In Jewish culture there is a saying about the Holocaust, “We must never forget.” But what of those artists who never forgot the Holocaust-who will remember them? Dead since 1993, the great Austrian filmmaker Axel Corti is one such person we should long to remember. His brilliantly nuanced trilogy, Where To and Back, remains a peerless entry in the genre of films addressing the plight of Jews during the Second World War. Created for Austrian television, Corti's stirring films achieve their complex spell by rendering the lives not of lauded heroes or grandiose figures but of unexceptional people as they struggle against fear, rootlessness, and an uncertain future. Beginning in Vienna on the eve of Kristallnacht in 1938 and culminating in the liberation of the city in 1945, Corti's far-reaching triptych gives us a torn and weary world where everything is up for grabs: identity is donned like a mask, memory conveniently fails, and morality becomes the shadow of opportunity. Sorrowful yet serene like the strains of Schubert that play throughout, Where To and Back embodies the search for meaning amidst the wreckage of humanity. Join us in revisiting Axel Corti, a director who remembered too much.