The Faithful City

82 Minutes, 1952
Genre:
Feature

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Directed by: Józef Lejtes
Cast: Jamie Smith, John Slater, Rachel Marcus, Avraham Ben Yosef, Dina Doron
Production:Yona Friedman, Józef Lejtes
Production Company:Moledet Films
Photographer: Gerald Gibbs
Languages: English, Hebrew
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Subtitles: Hebrew, French

An English-speaking American-Israeli co-production – made by pioneering Israeli studio, Moledet Films, and distributed by RKO Pictures – was one of the first films to have tackled the experience of orphaned Jewish children who had survived the Holocaust and made it to British Mandatory Palestine, just before the State of Israel was founded.
The film was directed by Józef Letjes, a Jewish-American Polish immigrant, with a script by Canadian author and screenwriter, Ben Barzman, whose big screen writing credits include, amongst others, The Boy with the Green Hair (Joseph Losey, 1948), El Cid (Anthony Mann, 1961), The Heroes of Telemark (Anthony Mann, 1965), and The Blue Max (John Guillermin, 1966). The film stars Jamie Smith (who, some may recognise from his breakout role in Stanely Kubrick’s 1955’s film, Killer’s Kiss.)
The year is 1948. The eve of the Israeli War of Independence. Sam, a counsellor in an all-boys summer camp in Upstate New York, arrives in Jerusalem to start work at a boarding school with child Holocaust survivors. Sam believes that kids will be kids, whatever the circumstances; however, Ezra, director of the boarding school who, himself has a concentration camp number tattoo on his arm, explains that these are children who have come from Hitler’s Europe, and who have had to grow up fast, under the most harrowing circumstances.
The counsellors and children soon strike up a deeply personal, close-knit bond. With time, Sam learns that Ezra was very much correct in his assessment, and that these children are, indeed, very different to anything he’s known back in America – they have endured life-changing trauma and would do anything to survive. He also realises that his hardline, disciplinarian approach may not be the most appropriate in these circumstances, and that he would perhaps do well to adapt a softer, more compassionate touch.

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