| A Story about a Bad Dream | |
|---|---|
reenactment of Eva sitting on the railroad tracks taken from the film |
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| Directed by | Pavel Stingl |
| Release date(s) | 2000 |
| Running time | 50 mins. |
| Country | Czech Republic |
| Language | Czech with English subtitles |
A Story about a Bad Dream was made in 2000 by director Pavel Stingl and brings to life the diary of Eva Erbenova, a little girl who survived the Holocaust. The documentary film based on her memoirs uses reenactments and has a child narrator and a naive view of World War II, in effect appealing to a slightly younger audience.
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The Czech reenacted documentary film was made with the intentions of preserving Eva's personal history for her children and grandchildren. While the film has an artistic appeal for adults, it maintains a tone that's gentle enough for a younger audience. Historic footage of the Nazis, drawings made by Jewish artists from inside the deportation camp, children's drawings of concentration camps that move and develop on screen, colorful reenacted scenes of her rescue, and Eva's family photographs are complied to tell the story of a scared little girl who survived the Holocaust but lost both her parents for reasons she could not fully understand.
A Story about a Bad Dream is an account of the Holocaust told from the perspective of a little girl, who makes sense of the world from her parents' expressions and her own feelings of discomfort and unhappiness.
“Suddenly I was like a grown up,” the little narrator confides, describing her arrival at the deportation camp, “I had to take care of myself.” Honest and unabashed, Evie, the little girl, offers a unique and highly personal look at the brutality played out during the Second World War.
Evie, like most children, believes her parents control the universe, so she's terrified and shocked when she sees them powerless to Nazi orders. When the family is told of their forced relocation to Theresienstadt, Evie catches the nuances in her parent's expressions and behavior. “I've never seen my parents look so serious,” she confides, and their change in demeanor frightens her.
The Holocaust smashed any hope of Evie's peaceful and innocent existence. Disease, squalor and death ran rampant. When they were later sent to a concentration camp her father was separated from her and her mother, and hunger left little Evie looking like a skeleton. When all hope seems to be lost, Evie miraculously escaped and was rescued.
The style of the film is consistently childish. Drawing directly from what's written in the diary, the narrator's vocabulary is too immature to be affected by political correctness, cliché, and prejudice. While the narrator's speech might be limited, the tone is unavoidably honest. Later, when she's riding up to the home of the modest German farming family that rescues her, she says, “I felt like a princess approaching her castle.”
The loss and sorrow Evie experienced is too great to be forgotten. She survived the war and is rescued by kindness, but her bright future cannot trump the horrors she's experienced. Evie was robbed of her childhood and her happy ending.
"Czech docs-- A Story about a Bad Dream". Institute of Documentary Films. http://www.docuinter.net/en/czech_docs.php?id=1. Retrieved July 30.