The biggest and most ridiculous lie about the Holocaust ever told

• History To understand the Holocaust

• 'The infiltrators' The Nazi lieutenant and the cultured aristocrat who tried to overthrow Hitler

• James Holland "The Holocaust was nonsense for Germany's interests in the war"

It's hard to give up the pleasure of a good story. After all, we are made of nothing but stories. We tell each other stories to chase away the fears of the night, we tell each other funny stories to combat the tedium of the afternoon and we tell each other the absurdity of dreams so that dawn makes sense.

the documentary by British

that after its presentation at the Seminci in Valladolid can be seen on the Movistar platform, it is a good example of how the desire to believe in a story can do everything; how the power of a well-told story captivates even the saddest of deceptions. And yet what is relevant is not so much what was told as what was told about us. Indeed, it is not so much what the story tells but how the story tells us. And so.

"We have a predisposition to believe that what they tell us is true," says the film's director as a motto and prologue.

And now the story. In the mid-1990s, an adorable neighbor from the small Massachusetts town of Millis began telling her neighbors about her life. Often happens. And his neighbors, between astonishment and compassion, did not give credit. The then almost old woman treasured an unhappy childhood like, necessarily, all the childhoods of World War II. Misha Defonseca, this is her full name, told how her parents had been deported and how, in the heat of Nazi infamy, she ended up in an adoptive family. He also told how at the age of 7, unhappy among the unhappy, he decided to go looking for his true parents in the unknown. And he did it without entrusting himself to anyone, braving the cold of winter and the solitude of the forests. From Belgium to Germany. And despite everything, he survived. And now the question: how? Very easy.

During much of the documentary, the viewer is invited to discover a story that is more than just surprising.

But also, more importantly, you are almost forced to believe it.

A neighbor who listened to Misha in Millis, who owns a publishing house, decided that the story was too serious to lose her breath in the middle of a lost town.

And so the book

Soon, the success of an unsuccessful life would come and with it, the interviews, the dramatization of the drama itself on television, the cries and the blows of the breast. The story of this woman was not only one of the crudest testimonies of barbarism but also referred to the deepest shared myths that place civilization itself before the mirror of its most intimate ruin. And you know, nature, embodied in the wild child, is good.

"When you work with something so tremendous," Hobkinson takes the floor again, "you realize that emotions force you to believe that something is true." In fact, the film plays with so much enthusiasm and little modesty to reveal Misha's story to the incredulous eyes of the viewer that for much of the footage the feeling of astonishment is confused with that of shame.

We are talking, don't forget, about the Holocaust.

And so on until in a twist of the now classic document

we realize thanks to the modest, serious and non-melodramatic testimonies of people like Eveylne Haende, survivor of the Shoah and patient documentary filmmaker, that all of the above it is nothing more than a fraud.

Suddenly, the documentary points to the viewer and also makes him an accomplice. And guilty next to those who told such nonsense and made us cry with him.

"Actually," says the director, "I never set out to make a documentary about the Holocaust in the strict sense. But as I progressed, I realized that this was exactly what I was doing. It was just a different kind of thing. documentary about the Holocaust. It is one that is less about the horror itself and more about the cultural shadow it has cast,

Seen in perspective and with the details of the story on the table, everything seems so childishly incredible that the question that arises is obvious: how did anyone ever believe such nonsense? But - and the tours of schools, television sets and newspaper pages prove it - we believed it. And how. "What the film highlights is the ease with which the memories of humanity's greatest tragedy can be '

' and converted for other purposes," says the filmmaker. And he adds: "While planning the film, I read '

by Javier Cercas, about the history of the appropriation of historical experience and memory similar to this of Enric Marco. It seems that in the era of '

, the challenge is how to make sure that

' do not cloud the memory of the real experience.

who are self-interestedly convinced that if one story is not true, why believe in the others. "

'Misha and the wolves'

thus manages to be many films in one and all of them convinced of the power of the story to tell us.

Not the other way around.

It is a denunciation of the spectacularization of the tragedy as it is a vindication of anonymous and gray rigor.

It is a detective tape with the same clarity that it ends up being the most tragic of comedies.

It's hard to give up the pleasure of a good story.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

Know more

• Belgium

• Germany

• theater

• cinema

• culture

• history

CineAdam Driver: "There is a direct and historical relationship between being an actor and being a military man"

Cine'Ninjababy 'and' El Planeta 'revolutionize the Gijón Film Festival, comedy and even feminism

CineJosé Sacristán, Goya of Honor Award 2022

See links of interest

• Last News

• Holidays 2021

• 2022 business calendar

• How to do

• Home THE WORLD TODAY

• Bayer 04 Leverkusen - Celtic

• Crvena Zvezda - Ludogorets Razgrad

• Dinamo Zagreb - KRC Genk

• FC Midtjylland - Sporting Braga

• Galatasaray - Marseille