Festival Screenings
Berlin Film Festival (2005)
Film Festival (2005)
Festival Bratislava (2005)
Film Festival (2005)
Film Forum (2007)
Contemporary Art, Boston (2007)
Washington DC (2007)
Family drama and historical truth collide in this film about the painful legacy cast by Hanns Ludin, a prominent Nazi executed for war crimes in 1947. In this astonishing documentary, Hanns Ludin’s son, filmmaker Malte Ludin, breaks 60 years of silence and repression, investigating his father’s dark deeds and interviewing his still-denying sisters. The film is an intimate look at the descendants of a Nazi perpetrator, most of whom refuse to accept the history of their family and of Nazi Germany more generally.
If it tells, in Mr. Ludin’s words, “a typical German story,” the movie also offers an unusually matter-of-fact picture of the private and public effects of ordinary evil.”
-A. O. Scott, New York Times“(Ludin’s) film courageously probes the effect of this legacy, and the revelations are shocking…[he] doesn’t shrink from debating heatedly with his sisters onscreen or exposing them to their children as liars.
- Richard Brody, New Yorker“A tattered family album of a documentary…2 or 3 Things can't reconcile Daddy's kind moon face with the Nazi regalia on his collar: His large hands, remembered so fondly by one daughter, signed deportment papers that dispatched other children's daddies to their deaths…gripping and confrontational viewing.
-Jim Ridley, Village Voice“This exceptional documentary…is an illumination of convenient rationalization and denial on a grand scale….A must-see for those always eager for more insight into the Nazi era, is also a cautionary tale about the power of denial and of evil that can be practiced by both the banal bureaucrat and the seemingly more refined bourgeois who should know better.”
-Doris Toumarkine, Film Journal“Without exaggeration–one of this year’s most important German films…a new quality in the cinematic treatment of National Socialism.”
- Peter Paul Huth, ZDF (German TV)“(4 Stars Editors' Pick): A bold struggle with the past and the silent present….In an era of shifting history and all-too-easily deniable facts, it's incumbent upon great films like Ludin's to share that viewpoint.
- Ken Fox, TV Guide
New York Times Review by A.O. Scott: "Our Father, the Nazi Zealot: A Family Grapples With Its Burdens and Blind Spots" (01/24/07)
AM New York Review by Jay Carr: "'Two or Three Things' Exposes a Family Horror" (01/23/07)
Jewish Week article: "My Dad, The War Criminal" (01/19/07)
Official film site: www.2oder3dinge.de
The National Center For Jewish Film
Brandeis University, Lown 102, MS053, Waltham MA 02454
P: (781) 899 7044, F: (781) 736 2070
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