Forbidden Films
Director: Felix
Moeller
Year: 2014
Rating: 6.0
Aka -
Verbotene Filme
During the Nazi regime in Germany from 1933
to 1945, there were some 1,200 films produced. Even when the war began to
go badly with Germany being bombed, they kept pumping out movies. Both Hitler
and Goebbels were big film fans and Goebbels would review them in his diary.
There were all sorts of films being made from musicals to historical dramas
to comedies to war films. And of course propaganda films. They all had to
be careful though not to offend their two main film critics. After the war,
the Allies labeled 300 of them as forbidden and locked them away. Forty of
these films are still banned in Germany.
Much of this German film discusses whether
those 40 films should still be banned or made public. Speakers on both sides.
I am always against banning pretty much anything - but then they showed clips
of a few of the films and I thought well, maybe not. The anti-Semitism in
Jew Suss and The Eternal Jew were so vile and the rise of rightwing hatred
being what it is in Germany and elsewhere, makes releasing these films questionable.
One film they dwell on is Home Coming - about the Polish crimes and persecution
against the Germans living in Poland before WWII. Huh? No, that was completely
false but Germany had their propaganda machine working up reasons to invade
Poland and rescue Germans. One audience member afterwards said he didn't
know how badly the Germans had it in Poland. That reaction is what scares
you. As we see here, the Big Lie and the thousands of little lies on social
media have idiots believing all sorts of things. Democrats are running pedophile
rings. Vaccines killed more people than covid. Trump won the election. It
is easy to make some people believe anything. And to hate. Hate gays, hate
immigrants, hate Muslims and Jews, hate the Other. How different are we?
A solid documentary, again more focused on these forbidden films and what
should be done with them than a history of them.