Feminists in Focus: Yes, There’s Room for More Films on the Holocaust

Three Promises

(The New York Jewish Film Festival, presented by The Jewish Museum and the Film Society of Lincoln Center, ended Jan. 26. Look for these films at other festivals and, hopefully, in commercial distribution.)

“Three Promises”

Charm is not a word usually associated with Holocaust remembrances, but take a look at “Three Promises,” the Serbian short with English subtitles that had its world premiere at the New York Jewish Film Festival. It tells the story of Serbian Jewry through beautifully animated collages of black and white photographs from one family’s album. The album survived the Nazis. Most of the family, like almost all of Belgrade’s 10,000 Jews, did not.

The album brings them back to life. It’s a valentine to the past, combined with the horrors.

Almost overloaded with Belgrade’s Sephardic Jewish history, the script by Edward Serotta tells the love story that triggered “Three Promises”: the promise a wife made to her husband to protect their daughters, the promise a priest made to this woman to hide the girls, and the promise one of the daughters made to herself that the priest would be recognized as a Righteous Gentile.

The love story is extraordinary. A Slovene Catholic woman visiting relatives in Belgrade falls in love with a man who is Jewish and crippled. She embraces not only him but his family and his religion. Years later, thanks to a Slovene priest in Belgrade, their two daughters survive to tell the tale.