DEARDEAR MR.MR. WALDMANWALDMAN Michtavim le America A FEATURE FILM BY HANAN PELED Awards: 3 NOMINATIONS Israeli Academy Awards Including Best Actor AUDIENCE AWARD, Reheboth Beach Independent Film Festival Selected Festival Screenings: Jerusalem International Film Festival UK Jewish Film Festival Palm Springs International Film Festival Munich Film Festival Atlanta Jewish Film Festival – Closing Night Film Washington DC Jewish Film Festival Palm Beach Jewish Film Festival Vancouver Jewish Film Festival Chicago Festival of Israeli Cinema San Diego Jewish Film Festival Sacramento Jewish Film Festival Denver Jewish Film Festival Israel Nonstop, NYC Distributed in North America by: The National Center for Jewish Film Brandeis University Lown 102, MS 053 Waltham, MA 02454 (781) 736-8600 [email protected] www.jewishfilm.org AN OPEN DOORS FILMS/TMUNA COMMUNICATIONS DEAR MR. WALDMAN It is the early 1960s in Tel Aviv and ten-year-old Hilik knows his goal in life – to make his parents happy and compensate for the grief they both suffered in the Holocaust. The fragile equilibrium of the new life Rivka and Moishe have forged for themselves and their sons, Hilik and Yonatan, in the new state of Israel begins to waver when Moishe convinces himself that Yankele, his son from his first marriage, didn't actually die in Auschwitz, but rather miraculously escaped to America, where he grew to adulthood and became an advisor to President John Kennedy. Moishe never really accepted the fact that he alone survived the Holocaust, and after seeing “Jack Waldman’s” picture in the newspaper, he finds himself sinking into his past. When Moishe writes a letter to Waldman, Hilik takes matters into his own hands. A coming-of-age story about the son of Holocaust survivors written and directed by the son of survivors, Dear Mr. Waldman beautifully captures the milieu of mid-century Tel Aviv and of peculiarities of growing up amid the emotional wreckage of the Holocaust. Superbly written and acted, Dear Mr. Waldman is a drama about the impact of profound loss on the intimacies of family and friendship and the restorative power of love and compassion. ISRAEL, 86 MINUTES, 35MM, COLOR, HEBREW WITH ENGLISH SUBTITLES CREDITS CAST Screenwriter & Director: Hanan Peled Rami Heuberger (Moishe) Producers: Yoav Halevy & Hanan Peled Yavgenia Dudina (Rivka) Production Company: OPEN DOORS Ido Port (Hilik) FILMS/Tmuna Communication Dov Glikman (Fruike) Director of Photography: Valentin Belonogov Evelin Kaplon (Rojka) Editing: Shimon Spector & Isaac Zechayek Roy Mayer (Yonatan) Original Music: Yoni Bloch Ela Armoni (Nirit) Art Director: Jacob Torjeman Costum Design: Rona Doron Sound Design: Israel David SUPPORTED BY Israel Film Fund, Keshet Broadcasting, Wextrust Capitol, Globus Group, Kolnoa Haskaot WEBSITES www.jewishfilm.org www.dearmrwaldman.com DIRECTOR STATEMENT by Hanan Peled About 12 years ago I went with my father to Germany. I took him to a doctor for a treatment for Psoriasis, s sickness that we both share, my father and me. After visiting the German doctor I took my father to Dachau near Munich, where my father had spent the last years of WW2. As we were wandering through the paths of the death camp, or what remained of it, I started thinking about the idea for a film in which I will try to explore and tell the special relationships I have with my father and with the whole big issue of my parent's past during the holocaust. The first draft of the screenplay was written about a year after that visit. It was mainly autobiographic and still wasn't structured as a dramatic story. A few years later I have decided to write the story first as a book. The book was telling the journey of my father and me to Germany, and in between were scene of my childhood in Tel Aviv during the sixties. The book got published and got very good reviews. I realized it touched a sensitive nerve of many readers, and not just people who had connections with the holocaust. Many people felt attached to the father-son relationship, and I was amazed to realize that even young readers, teenagers, could relate to the book and were agitated by it. The next step was to readapt the book to a screenplay again. By this time the premise of the story was much clearer to me. I took a step aside from real events and looked for the metaphor that will deliver the premise of the story in a crystallized and sharp form. One of the episodes in the book, and in real life, was the story about my father writing a letter to J.F Kennedy's adviser who carried the same Family name as ours (In real life it was Feldman) My father wrote a letter to the Whitehouse, hoping to find a forgotten relative in the American government. After some time an answer came, a disappointing answer I should say, and that was the end of it. Shakespeare once said that: "Plays should not tell the reality as it is, but as it could have been" Or as an Israeli well-known writer phrased it: "Stories are opportunities to live our life again in a different, sometimes amended, way". The decision to take the story of the lost relative was combined with the fact that my father had a previous family before the war, a wife and 2 years old boy, who disappeared one night and were sent to Auschwitz, while my father was working in the German bindery outside the Ghetto. The premise of the story became clear to me now. As a member of the group of "2nd generation to holocaust survivors, I was motivated all my life to please my parents and compensate them for the great indescribable lost and suffering that they went through. As I grow up I fought against this unbearable burden that blocked me from developing my own life, and sometime even mange to lead a normal life, but as a young boy I was defenseless and took this duty without hesitations, questions or resistance. I knew I must make my parents happy, what ever it takes, and whatever sacrifices I had to give. Besides being too young to even grasp the meaning of the holocaust, I also had to compete with dead people and slowly realizing that I became as many others 2nd generation sons and daughters, by the age of ten, a parent of my parents. This premise with the two story elements became the basis of the story of the final screenplay "Tea and Rice". I omitted the journey story of the present, and concentrated on the past. It became a story of 10 years old boy who is trying desperately to make his father happy. When the chance that his father's first dead son could be alive and even became an important American, Hilik is determined to do anything, as he knows his duty is, to please his father, even if it means faking a letter just to calm his father, and even when there is a danger that little Hilik would loose is father forever, he doesn't hesitate and fulfills his duty, causing a turmoil and almost the dismantlement of the whole family. But Hilik is brave enough and wise enough to try and fix what he had done. After seeing the consequences and, by the first time in his life seeing his mother side (He learns from his brother that their mother was already once inside the showers of Auschwitz and somehow was taken back to the block, an experience that made her cling to life by all means.) The truth falls on Moishe's head as a heavy rock. He passes a process of death and resurrection, and only after a week of lying in bed and mourning for the first real time after his dead son and first wife, and after Hilik takes away the "evil eye" conducting a ritual he'd learnt from his father, Moishe is ready to start his life with his new family. As the story deals mainly with relationships, the look of the film will be mostly intimate and interiors. The faces will be the main characters of the film, decorated with the streets, the colors and noises of Tel Aviv during the early sixties. There are few fantasy scenes, the last scene and two dream scenes that will have a special atmosphere to differentiate from the realistic scenes. Even though the scenes will be realistic, I will try to make them somewhat unique in color and atmosphere, concentrate on warm colors, so that they will deliver the feeling of reminiscence. Camera movement will mainly follow action and not become an additional actor, with exception of several scenes in which the camera will play a bigger roll. Music will be a mixture of a background music emphasizing dramatic or comic moments, with music of the sixties as heard from radios, record players, etc. Final remark: During those 12 years of process I lost my father and mother, and they are both dead now. To my regret, they will not see the film, in which I am trying to sum up the essence of our relationship, but there are millions of 2nd and 3rd generations to the holocaust that will easily find themselves and the story I am trying to tell. HANAN PELED (DIRECTOR & SCREENWRITER) Born 1951 in Tel-Aviv, Israel, Hanan Peled is a well-known Israeli writer for fiction films, television dramas, plays, and novels. Hanan lives in Tel-Aviv. Fiction Film Filmography 2001 RETURN FROM INDIA (HASHIVA MEHODO, Dir: Menahem Golan) – Screenwriter 1991 A BIT OF LUCK (TIPAT MAZAL, Dir.