AMNESIA: Marthe Keller stars in the versatile Barbet Schroeder's latest surprise

Say what you will about the career of Iranian-born, raised-in-African-and-South-America, studied-at-the-Sorbonne director, writer and often producer, Barbet Schroeder, but this hugely versatile and usually successful fellow seems to be able to make movies both documentary (Terror's Advocate) and narrative, the latter in multitudinous genres -- from More to Maîtresse, Barfly, Reversal of Fortune and now his latest addition, an intimate little drama of past, present, guilt and sound, entitled AMNESIA.

Mr. Schroeder, shown at left, certainly chooses interesting projects, as a quick scan of his IMDB resume will prove. His latest, the bittersweet story of a German expat woman in her senior years coming to terms with her past, also gives this senior-years filmmaker (he'll be 76 next month) the opportunity to explore things like guilt, courage, memory and retribution.

For his lead actress and star, Schroeder is fortunate to have a woman who seems to have grown ever more beautiful and able over the years. That would be Marthe Keller, shown below and further below, who plays a character named Martha, about whom we know almost nothing as the film begins. By its end we've learned plenty.

Though set on the uber-photogenic island of Ibiza (in the 1990s), Amnesia deals more with Germany than with Spain, where a German fellow named Jo, played by the current face and body of young Germany, Max Riemelt (below, of The Wave, Free Fall and the often silly but lots of fun Netflix series Sense8), moves in nearby the gorgeous house occupied by Martha and begins what becomes a fast friendship.

Jo has come to Ibiza to work on his music, as well as (or so he hopes) perform as a DJ in a local club (named Amnesia), and soon we and Martha are listening to his music, learning a little about him, and watching as this May/November friendship grows.

Martha is keeping a lot of secrets, and the closer our pair grows, the more we and Jo learn about this lovely, buttoned-up lady. Those secrets involved Martha's past, as well as Germany's, and when Jo's mother (Corinna Kirchhoff), second from right, below and grandfather (played by the great Bruno Ganz, below center and two photos down, the face and body of an older Germany) come for a visit, the shit -- quietly and understatedly -- hits the proverbial fan.

Much of this movie is devoted to sound -- Jo's music, and the quiet, lovely conversations between him and Martha -- and the secrets, those of Martha as well as the grandfather, are revealed simply via talk. This makes the movie much less melodramatic than it might have been in the hands of other filmmakers and/or cast members.

Instead, we are forced to slowly and quietly confront what we see, hear and learn, and then make what we can of it all. There are no villains here, only people who had to make urgent, sometimes horrible decisions, resulting in guilt that leads to a kind of forced amnesia.

And yet the movie, thanks to its simply gorgeous location scenery and its even, thoughtful tone, is never difficult to endure. In fact, it is a genuine pleasure to see and hear Ms Keller in a role that makes such fine use of her skills. Ditto Mr. Riemelt, and the rest of the small cast.

Especially well-done is the very genuine and loving relationship that develops between Martha and Jo and which, though we do not see its consummation, becomes a momentarily physical one, too, I suspect. This sort of thing is tricky, but it handled here about as well as can be.

Mr. Schroeder, as co-writer (with Emilie Bickerton, Peter F. Steinbach and Susan Hoffman), frames his story as mostly flashback, with its opening and closing segments set a decade hence. This works well, too, giving us both closure and a lovely sense of necessary continuity.

From Film Movement and running just 96 minutes, Amnesia opens theatrically this Friday, July 21, in New York City at the Cinema Village, and will then hit several other cities in the weeks to come. (It opens in South Florida at the Coral Gables Art Cinema on Friday, August 11.) Click here then scroll down to view all currently scheduled playdates, cities and theaters. For those of you not in or near the cities where the film will open theatrically, it will simultaneously be available to view on July 21, via VOD.

Note: Barbet Schroeder will be at the opening night 

screening at New York City's Cinema Village this

Friday, July 21, to introduce the film and do a Q&A.

Chanoch Ze'evi's HITLER'S CHILDREN: best in a banner year's Holocaust documentaries

Enabling us to view the Holocaust anew, opening our eyes, mind and heart so that we can view one of history's most horrible events from a different angle, is no easy task, particularly in our current times, when we seem to have a new film on the subject -- narrative or documentary -- coming to theaters with each new week.  The beauty of young filmmaker Chanoch Ze'evi's new documentary, HITLER'S CHILDREN, is that it manages exactly this, while keeping us riveted intellectually and emotionally, hanging on every word uttered by the half-dozen participants interviewed by the filmmaker -- one of which, Eldad Beck (below), is an Israeli journalist now living in Germany and a third-generation descendant of Holocaust survivors, while the other five are the "children" of the title.

As any viewer, young or old, even mildly interested in WWII and the Holocaust will know, Adolf Hitler had no actual, fruit-of-his-loins children. The men and women we see here are the second- and third-generation offspring of some of the top Nazi officials immediately under Der Führer: Hermann Göring, Heinrich Himmler, Rudolf Hoess, Amon Goeth and Hans Frank.

We've had plenty of tales from Holocaust survivors (and now from the descen-dants of those survivors) and from the Germans who helped create or at least abetted this horror. Most often these are from what you might call "every-day folk" (were the Holocaust anything like an "everyday" occurrence). The difference with Hitler's Children is that here we have the descendants of those closest to Adolf Hitler and his gang: people whose guilt and shame, if undeserved, still clings to them like a second skin.

How do they deal with this? The filmmaker, pictured above, allows us to learn -- and in this learning, we're able to understand more -- to get our minds around a subject we may have imagined finished and closed. As it opens up again in front of us, we're forced to confront all sorts of subsidiary but important themes: parents, and how to properly "honor" them; DNA's connection to responsibility; the hereditary properties of good and evil; and more -- the centrifugal spin here is immense.

Göring's great-niece Bettina (above, who looks more like him than even his daughter did) retains a sense of humor and irony but had to get away from Germany and now lives in New Mexico. Make of it what you will (and the filmmaker simply allows us to learn this fact), but she and her brother had themselves sterilized so that the fami-ly line/name could not continue. This is guilt played out IMAX-size.

Katrin Himmler, grand-niece of Heinrich and now married to an Israeli Jew, tells us that her great uncle was such a monster that all other members of that family, who were also ardent Nazis, seemed so insignificant that nobody mentioned them or asked any questions. Feeling overwhelmed whenever she left Germany and had to face outsiders, she learned as many foreign languages as possible to obscure her German accent.

Adolf Hitler’s god son, Niklas Frank, was eight years old when his father, Hans was hung at Nuremburg for war crimes. His manner of honoring his father is to, fittingly, dishonor him both in a scathing book he wrote and in his visits to schools around his country, telling the students in no uncertain terms what his father did and what he, Niklas, thinks of that -- and of his dad. All this provides some of the most interesting footage in the film. If this is "penance," then more power to it!

Grandson of Rudolf Hoess -- Rainer -- makes his first trip to Auschwitz in the company of journalist Beck, and what happens there is doubly striking, both for what Hoess experiences and what Beck has to say about it. Finding "closure" -- every talk-show hosts' favorite goal -- is beginning to seem like a fool's errand, never more so than with a subject like this one. Mr. Beck, a third generation product, suggests that the Holocaust has no real ending. After all we've seen and continue to see, I'm inclined to agree. Think of Hitler's Children*, then, as one of the great "middles" of Holocaust film literature.

The documentary, from the ever-more-indispensible Film Movement and running just 80 minutes, opened theatrically in New York City this past Friday, November 16 for at least one week's run at the Quad Cinema and will open in the Miami area at the O Cinema on Thursday, November 29. As with all FM titles, a DVD will appear eventually.

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*Hitler's Children is also the name of an interesting 1943 narrative movie, a pulpy piece of anti-Nazi propaganda that stars the very cute Bonita Granville as an American girl studying in Germany who is declared "German" by the government and so cannot return home. As a typically American, WWII look at Hitler Youth and the travails of the Nazi nightmare, it's fun in its slightly silly, lured-for-its-day, manner. Netflix seems not to have it, but you can catch it from time to time on Turner Classic Movies.

DVDebut--Geoffrey Sax's CHRISTOPHER & HIS KIND: finally, a properly "gay" Cabaret

Made, it appears, for British television (they show full-frontal on Brit TV?), CHRISTOPHER AND HIS KIND is a pleasant surprise in a number of ways. While it never quite escapes that certain TV-level plateau in its writing, direction and production values -- all is perfectly accept-able, mind you, but rarely rises above that -- the film still offers plenty of enjoyable moments, ripe visuals and stellar, sometimes juicy performances.

Based on the 1976 autobiographical book by  Christopher Isherwood, which has been adapted by Kevin Elyot and directed by Geoffrey Sax (pictured at left), this 90-minute movie plows through a raft of experiences that Isherwood had while in 1930s Germany during the build-up of Nazism that culminated in World War II. Infinitely "gayer" than its internationally known and much-beloved movie musical predecessor, Cabaret (itself lifted from the so-so Broadway show of the same name that boasted a very nice score, a deft turn by Joel Grey and little else), this TV movie quickly and smartly plays its trump card -- the fact that so much more can now be shown and told about homosexual life than was possible back in 1972, when the movie musical was first released -- ensuring that its core audience gets plenty of what it will surely demand (see below).

Fortunately, we get a bit more than sex and skin (though there is plenty of that and what we see is very nicely arrayed), starting with the surprisingly good and on-the-mark performance from Matt Smith (at left, above and below, and one of the many Dr. Whos), who portrays Isherwood as the randy and increasingly thoughtless and selfish young-unto-middle-aged man for whom life was basical-ly an interesting and enjoyable game. His square face, with deep-set eyes and broad nose, is even quite reminiscent of the young Michael York, who played the Isherwood character in Cabaret.

Also in the cast are Toby Jones, slumming enjoyably as one of the tenants in Christopher's rooming house, Lindsay Duncan (above, right), very well-cast as Isherwood's mother, and Imogen Poots (below) in the role of another tenant, the chanteuse Jean Ross, who would later be immortalized as Sally Bowles. Ms Poots, while she will not make you forget the sterling work of a certain Ms Minnelli, is quite good in her own right.

Unlike the musical version, C and His K concentrates on two of Isherwood's lovers during this period, the hunky German, Caspar (Alexander Doetsch, below), who is clearly in it for the money,

and a quieter, needy young man, Heinz (Douglas Booth, below), whom our "hero" takes under his wing (and other body parts) and whom he tries to spirit out of Nazi Germany before war begins.

The film moves quickly through one event after another and, interesting as these are, none of them cut deeply. Everything seems designed for speed and comprehension, which is certainly appreciated. But it leaves little room for art. The camerawork is generally kept close to the vest, for budget reasons I'm sure, and as usual, when you simply hang those red, black and white Swastika banners adjacent a building or two, you've immediately created a colorful and corrupt Nazi Germany.

Still, Smith's nailing of the Isherwood character, the many fine supporting performances, and the filmmakers' insistence that the entire scene, at long last, be as gay as it actually was go a long way toward making the movie an entertaining watch.

Christopher and His Kind made its DVD debut at the end of this past June (sorry, no Blu-ray) and is available now for purchase or rental from the usual suspects.