Yet there was a roadblock to Holland’s filming the true story of Jews who hid under the streets of Lvov, sheltered by a Catholic sewer worker who gradually came to identify with the people he helped at first only for cash.
“I passed on it, two or three times,” says the gray-haired, black-clad director, in town in January to present “In Darkness” at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. “Because I didn’t want to make it in English. And I was a little afraid to do this kind of movie again, for my inner health.”
The first problem was solved when the script — like Angelina Jolie’s for “In the Land of Blood and Honey” — was translated into the languages of its characters. That’s why “In Darkness” is vying for this year’s foreign language film Oscar.
“For me, it was absolutely obvious,” Holland says. “I didn’t want to make another Holocaust story in English. I just felt that it would be fake.
“When an American director like Spielberg does it, it’s natural to him. But for me, it was the first step to have any right to tell this story. I thought a lot of things would be lost in translation. Especially with Lvov, which was multicultural and multilingual” (and is now the Ukrainian city of Lviv).
So Holland — who divides her time among Los Angeles; Brittany, France; and Poland — had the screenplay rendered into several languages. These include such nearly lost ones as Yiddish and Bolak, a working-class Polish dialect. “Only a small part of the audience can really appreciate it,” she says. “But I think it’s like music. If the music is different, you feel the movie differently.”
The director also resisted making “In Darkness,” she says, because “it costs a lot to do a movie like this. After ‘Europa, Europa,’ I said, ‘Never again.’ Then 20 years later, I did another one. But I don’t think I will do another one in 20 years.”
Holland lists many potential dangers of addressing the Holocaust in a fictionalized feature: “Being moralistic, being sentimental, looking for some good-feeling lesson coming from this experience, because I think it’s impossible to have one. Making all the Jewish characters some kind of faceless angels. To make it black and white. To make it accusatory. To re-create cliches that have already been told many times.”
Like the director’s previous Holocaust movies, “In Darkness” presents its overwhelming subject in microcosm: A dozen Jews escape the local ghetto and find themselves under the protection of Leopold Socha, sewer rat and petty thief.
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