back to berlin…

I went along to the Watershed this afternoon to see Catherine Lurie’s thoughtful, sobering documentary “Back In Berlin”. It follows eleven Jewish bikers travelling from Israel to Berlin for the Maccabiah Games (often referred to as the ‘Jewish Olympics’).
In 1930, a group of Jewish bikers travelled to all corners of Europe to find participants for the first Maccabiah Games. In 2015, to commemorate this heroic journey, 11 Jewish bikers set off from Israel once again to re-trace their ancestors' footsteps and carry the Maccabiah torch to the site of the infamous 1936 Berlin Olympics for the first games held on German soil. Travelling 4500km across 7 countries in just 24 days, together they explore their dark genocidal past and discover how they or they families survived the Holocaust.
Given the populist movements from both the left and right rising again today, “Back to Berlin” provides an essential connection between the past and present. It’s a cautionary tale but also a story of defiance, survival and people overcoming the worst from others to restate our common humanity – and with the games themselves being a kind of redemption. Or, as the Guardian film critic, Peter Bradshaw, aptly describes it: “an Olympic flame of hope burning defiantly in the presence of moral darkness”.
It’s a beautiful, evocative and poignant documentary that reflects on anti-semitism in Europe and very much worth seeing.
PS: There were just me and five others in the audience, but I did strike up an interesting conversation with a fascinating, highly intelligent, 83 year-old man (a former nuclear scientist)… and, for some reason(!), we found ourselves talking about Trump and Brexit (he started it!!)(note: he was very much ‘a man after my own heart’!) and bemoaning how on earth we’d come to find ourselves in the current mess. At the end of the film, he turned to me, wiping tears from his eyes, and simply said: “an emotional journey”. He was absolutely right.