Moral challenge is the theme of Hava Kohav Beller’s 1991 documentary film, “The Restless Conscience: Resistance to Hitler Within Germany 1933-1945,” to be screened Sunday.
The film, a nine-year project for Beller, presents interviews with resisters who attempted to subvert Adolf Hitler’s rise to power and interviews with descendants of other resisters. Also included are clips of sham show trials that expose the torture that resisters experienced before they were executed. “The Restless Conscience” received an Academy Award nomination in 1992 for best documentary.
Beller, who lives in New York, says of her film: “It is about human beings in a particular time, a historic time, which presented challenges that forced them to make moral decisions.
“The one thing we must all recognize,” says Beller, who will discuss her work with the audience after the screening, “is that we are responsible for one another, as we are indeed our brothers’ keepers.”
“The Restless Conscience,” part of the Film Center of the Art Institute of Chicago’s “Confronting the Past” program co-sponsored by the Goethe-Institut Chicago and the Spertus Institute for Jewish Studies, will be shown at 6 p.m. Sunday in the Film Center Theater at the School of the Art Institute, Columbus Drive at Jackson Boulevard, Chicago, Ill. Tickets are $5. Call 312-443-3733.
