CINEMA ALL SOULS

—by Marietta Moskin

The monthly movie nights at All Souls have just completed their third thanks to the diligent search for interesting films by the program’s producer, Neil Osborne. For February, Neil arranged to show the award-winning German film, Sophie Scholl: The Final Days, which had been shown at the church once last year and had been nominated for an Oscar for best foreign film in 2006.

Sophie Scholl was a young student in Hitler’s Germany who became involved in an anti-war, anti-Hitler movement called The White Rose in 1943 when the German army massively lost its Russian offensive. Caught in the act of distributing pamphlets at the campus of Munich University, Sophie and her brother faced swift retribution from the Nazi legal system which convicted and then executed them by guillotine within days of their arrest. The film, based on actual trial records and contemporary writings, portrays how Sophie tries to protect her brother and other conspirators by claiming authorship of the pamphlets, rejecting compromising pleas and accepting blame for the whole enterprise. The scenes of her interrogations and trial commemorate acts of dedication and courage now hailed as exemplary by today’s German youth.

What makes this film particularly valuable in our contemporary political climate is the constantly repeated phrase used throughout the film about how Sophie’s actions would demoralize and be an affront to the soldiers at the front. It is a phrase eerily reminiscent of the complaints directed at critics of the Iraq war today and should serve as a warning about learning lessons from the past.

During the discussion meeting after the film, a group of modern-day White Rose protesters wearing T-shirts with the slogan “We will not be Silenced” in various languages was introduced and spoke about their current efforts to make people aware that those who want to end the war and save the lives of our soldiers must not be silent.

It was an emotional and memorable evening.