David
Germany, 1979; 111 mins.
Directed by Peter Lilienthal

Director Lilienthal was ten years old when he left Germany for Uruguay with his mother in 1939, and he returned to Germany only in 1956. The film is derived from the autobiography of Joel König, not from the director's life, but Lilienthal himself wrote the final draft of the screenplay in order to "combine David's character with my own, and his experiences with mine." This circumstance gives the film its distinctive perspective, along with the director's emphasis on the family and his portrayal of Judaism seen proudly if unemphatically from the inside.

The film begins in the provincial Eastern German city of Liegnitz in 1933 and illustrates the first experiences of the new regime by a rabbi's family. The story then jumps to 1938 and Berlin, where David and his brother have come because any normal life is foreclosed to them in Liegnitz. The rest of the story unfolds in and around Berlin in the years up to 1943.

Considering that its subject involves the Holocaust, the film is remarkable for what it does not do. The director has elsewhere expressed his aversion to displaying violence directly on screen, and there are no scenes of the horror of the extermination program. There is tension in the fundamental circumstances of the story, but it is never heightened into melodrama. The film hints and refers and reminds rather than displays. Even its colors are subdued..

Instead, this is the story of a particular young man, an adolescent with strong ties to his family and his religious community, wandering in a world turned hostile and inexplicable. The film is thoughtful and intimate, never sentimental. It has things to say that are missed by the hammer blows of other approaches.