Petr Ginz's promising life was extinguished in an Auschwitz gas chamber in 1944 when he was 16, but a movie showing twice tonight in Atlanta holds the promise of reviving interest in his remarkable paintings and writings for generations to come.
"The Last Flight of Petr Ginz," an American-made documentary about the wise-beyond-his-years Czech teen who composed and illustrated an allegorical story about the tyranny of Hitler even as German troops were occupying his native Prague, is the concluding feature of the three-week Atlanta Jewish Film Festival.
It's a major part of a renaissance of interest in Ginz, whose diaries were published in 2008 more than six decades after they were written, illustrated with his frequently Jules Verne-inspired art, following their discovery in a Prague home that once belonged to a close friend of Ginz's family.
North Carolina filmmaker Sandy Dickson happened upon a copy of "The Diary of Petr Ginz" in a Winston-Salem bookstore while waiting out her mother's hair appointment and was so compelled by the book's expressiveness that she tracked down his sister by phone in Israel the next day.
The former Eva Ginz, now known as Chava Pressburger, had already been approached by New York and London-based film production teams. But there was something in the interest Dickson expressed that led her to delay a decision until the Wake Forest University Documentary Film Program faculty member could hurriedly write a treatment and book a flight to Israel.
"I was drawn to the fact that there was this art that was so whimsical and fantastical," recalled Dickson, who will appear at Q&As after both screenings with team member Churchill Roberts. "I was really pulled into his imagination."
Dickson believed Pressburger, herself an artist, trusted the Wake Forest filmmakers to tell her brother's story because of their plan to focus on his bright imagination more than his dark end. Ginz, after all, captured the beauty of spring's flowering even as he was held in the ghetto-like Terezin transit camp in northwest Czechoslovakia and depicted moonscapes before man ventured there.
"The Last Flight of Petr Ginz" animates his art, largely unknown until the Space Shuttle Columbia carried some of it, setting it to John Califra's soaring music. Unlike many Holocaust documentaries, historians and other talking heads are kept to a minimum in what Dickson calls a "celebration" of Ginz's life.
"We pretty early on decided that three things would guide how we structured the film," Dickson said. "One would be Petr's art, two would be his voice, three would be the voice of his sister. Because we saw it in many respects as a love story between a brother and a sister."
Pressburger also was drawn by the Americans' belief that their film could be part of a greater educational outreach about Ginz and the Holocaust to young audiences.
Though their documentary is making its film festival circuit debut tonight in Atlanta, that educational push is well underway. "The Last Flight of Petr Ginz" screened in January at the United Nations as part of its annual Holocaust commemoration, and, in anticipation of a wide international release, the U.N. has partnered with Wake Forest to translate the documentary into five languages and to produce a detailed study guide in seven.
Next, the film will be the centerpiece of a four-month film festival kicking off in March in the Czech Republic. The filmmakers also are raising funds to send it and an exhibit of art by Ginz and other children of the Holocaust on an American museum tour.
In essence, Ginz's "Last Flight" is only beginning to take wing.
Movie preview
"The Last Flight of Petr Ginz"
7 and 9:20 p.m. Wednesday at United Artists Tara Cinemas 4. $10; ages 65 and up, students with valid ID and ages 12 and under, $9. 866-214-2072, www.ajff.org.
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