Beat the Heat: Resistance: They Fought Back
Director: Kirk Wolfinger, Paula S. Apsell Run Time: 90 min. Rating: NR Release Year: 2024
Starring: Andrew Kishino, Joel de la Fuente, Julie Benko, Lisa Loeb, Mark Zeisler
Country: Poland
Language: Polish, Latvian, English, Hebrew, Lithuanian
Thanks to a partnership with Columbus City Council, all screenings at Gateway Film Center on Tuesday, June 19th, and Wednesday, June 20th, noon until 6:00 p.m., are free to the public and include a complimentary popcorn and soda.
Take a break from the heat, watch a film, or a few, while supporting local, nonprofit cinema. Visit Ticket Center on the day of the screening to reserve your spot!
About the film:
We’ve all heard of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, but most people have no idea how widespread and prevalent Jewish resistance to Nazi barbarism was. Instead, it’s widely believed “Jews went to their deaths like sheep to the slaughter.” Filmed in Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Israel, and the U.S., Resistance – They Fought Back provides a much-needed corrective to this myth of Jewish passivity. There were uprisings in ghettos large and small, rebellions in death camps, and thousands of Jews fought Nazis in the forests. Everywhere in Eastern Europe, Jews waged campaigns of non-violent resistance against the Nazis.
About the filmmakers:
Paula S. Aspell created the feature documentary Resistance — They Fought Back (2024) with the goal of correcting the myth of Jewish passivity during the Holocaust. Before that, she spent 35 years as the senior executive producer of the PBS NOVA science series, responsible for more than 650 documentaries in the sciences, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine, which won every major broadcasting award including the Emmy, the Peabody, the duPont-Columbia University Gold and Silver Batons, and an Academy Award nomination for Special Effects. She has been recognized with numerous individual awards, including the 2018 Lifetime Achievement Emmy of the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences. Now CEO of Leading Edge Productions, Inc., she directed and wrote Resistance — They Fought Back (2024).
Kirk Wolfinger is an Emmy and Peabody Award winning filmmaker and the President of Lone Wolf Media. Lone Wolf is widely known as a leader in factual entertainment and is responsible for many award-winning documentaries that have aired on PBS as well as the National Geographic, History, and Smithsonian Channel. Wolfinger’s’s forte is adventure, science, and historical programming. Among the many NOVA episodes he produced and directed is Holocaust Escape Tunnel, which tells the story of a landmark archeological discovery of a tunnel that Jewish prisoners used to escape their Nazi and Lithuanian captors.
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