This coming Sunday at the Academy Awards, the film Sophie Scholl is nominated for Best Foreign Film. It is a true story of the title character who was part of the student resistance movement in Munich in the early 1940’s. The film tells the story of the last week of her life when she is planning an anti-Hitler leaflet handout at her college with the fellow members of their group which they called The White Rose.
There was so much good information in the film and it took me to a place I had thought about before. Where was the resistance within Germany? I knew there must be a significant group of leftists who were not sent to the camps early on and I wanted to know how they tried to stop the collective insanity that was life under the Third Reich. Hearing these people speak their truth amid the fear that was life in 1942 Germany has so much resonance to dissidents in America in 2006. The same tired rhetoric is heard from the Nazi’s about the need for absolute support of the troops that we hear from Neocons and Republicans and fearful Democrats. The strength of a democracy should enable anyone to try and stop an unjust war, even after the fighting starts.
Sophie Scholl has a very good shot at winning the Oscar this Sunday. I think the film “Paradise Now” is an even more affecting film but the odds of a Palestinian film being awarded the prize is unfortunately more of a longshot even though I would love to be proven wrong. The main performance by Julia Jentsch is a better one than any of the 5 nominated Best Actress nominees. The Academy used to recognize great foreign performances but even the Hollywood Foreign Press (The Golden Globes) screwed up royally here by missing both Jentsch’s performance as well as Johnny Depp’s for “The Libertine”.
