The following films have two features in common: They all deal with the Holocaust, and therefore, they are stories of the Jewish people BEFORE the birth of the modern State of Israel, with Jerusalem as the ancient, Biblical, eternal capital of the Jewish people.

For the writer, these films are a turning point in understanding how historical epics can shape a nation and a people through film. Each story employs the genres of memoir-true story/historical epic/drama.




Genre: Memoir/True Story/Drama 3-Minute Short Film
This is a brilliant short film that won many awards. I’ll break the script down into its Story Beats. In just three minutes, all of the Story Beats are there! Please note that dialog does not carry a story, whether it’s a film, stage play, or novel. What carries a story are value systems and moral choices. This film only has seven lines of dialog!

Premise: When a young Nazi boy discovers a young Jewish girl in hiding, he rebels to fend off her capture.
Designing Principle: A boy’s courage when he goes against the norm can overcome oppression.
Theme: Repression cannot stifle human courage.



The Hero’s Psychological Weakness: Repressed and beaten down. We are shown this when the adult Nazi smacks the boy across the face and knocks him down and then smashes the unicorn with his boot.
Moral Weakness: None. His Nazi friends run when they hear a noise, most likely to inform the adult Nazi that a Jew might be hiding. He stays to investigate.
Need: Freedom from tyranny

Inciting Incident: A noise comes from what appears to be an abandoned room.
Desire: He wants to save the Jewish girl.
Plan: He hands the Nazi the porcelain unicorn in his hand and shamefacedly says he’s sorry, as if he stole this from the room. He does this to deflect from the Nazi suspecting anything strange.
Opponent: The Nazi commandant
Climax/Battle: The elderly German (Hero) in the present time hands the elderly Jewish woman (little girl) a box. She opens it and it’s a porcelain unicorn.
Self-Revelation: The two of them sit together and smile, both of them liberated and free from repression.
New Equilibrium: None needed.

Open with Story World and use the technique of the Memoir/True Story, where we start with the Battle/Climax and then do a Time Jump into the past. The present time or Ordinary World: greenery, blue skies, well-kept lawns; comfort. Segue way through a window to Time Jump: Germany, 1943. Abandoned room.

Young German boys, Nazi regime, in a room that has been abandoned – cigarettes in ashtrays, dishes. Most likely the people inside were hauled off by the Nazis.

0-24: Present time. This is right before the Climax/Battle scene. An elderly German approaches with trepidation the outside door of a well-tended, if not quaint, home. He hesitates, looks at the doorbell. He looks at the curtained window.
24 – 2:27: With the window as a segue way, Time Jump to Germany, 1943 screen overlay.
The following lines of dialogue are spoken:
Hero: What is that?
Jewish girl: It’s a unicorn.
Hero: (looking at the Jewish girl’s yellow star on her sleeve) Never seen one up close
before.
Jewish girl: (touching the Jewish star) Beautiful.
Hero: (hearing the Nazis coming) Get away!
Hero: (after the Jewish girl hesitates) Get away!
Important note: The Jewish girl is shocked that the young Nazi boy would actually be attempting to save her, so she hesitates to move.
Hero: (to the Nazi Commandant) I’m sorry.
2:27 – end: Time Jump to present time, back to the Climax/Battle scene: As the German man is losing courage to ring the doorbell, the Jewish woman slowly opens the door.
The next scene is inside her house. She opens the box and it is a shiny porcelain unicorn.




Genres: Memoir/True Story/Drama/Historical epic

This is the epic story of war from the perspective of the Hero, a German Jewish 14-year-old teenager caught up in WWII. The Hero’s story of survival in a world gone mad with the backdrop of the Holocaust is but one of the themes running through this story line.



The Character Web is crafted so that we see the horrors of the war through the eyes of the Germans, the Nazis, the Hitler youth, the Russians, the Poles, the German Jews, the Polish Jews, German army foot soldiers, and German society through the eyes of the mother, whose daughter gets pregnant to donate the baby to the Fuhrer and make their family roots more Aryan…

To pull off the Character Web so brilliantly, the script goes beneath the “skin” of all the characters. The weakness/need and moral choices that each character has to make deal with one of the central dilemmas of WWII: Ideologies people had to buy into or fight against in order to survive. The use of subtext in the dialogue, whereby the character never really says what he means leads to an avoidance of conflict, but then an implosion of conflict as the plot moves forward.

The Story World was one of the most authentic ever put to screen: Land, tools, technology, man-made buildings, structures either showing extreme poverty and suffering, or extreme power; the looming and grandiose Third Reich symbols and the institutionalization of the human psyche; the dumbing down while ostensibly seeming to educate – The Lodz ghetto, with the dying Jewish populace amidst a Nazi bureaucracy; train protocol; trolly protocol; army protocol, etc., all displayed with an accuracy down to the tableware and the machinery; the clothing; the murders in plain sight.

All of the structural beats were spot on: The Inciting Incident; the 12 sequences; the mid-point, all leading to the Climax/Battle scene in Sequence 11, right on the mark.

The powerful opening scene is a Brit Mila, the Jewish ritual circumcision that every male child is to have, according to the Torah and Avraham’s covenant with the Jewish people. The Hero has to then hide his Jewishness/circumcised dead give-away self throughout the story. The last scene goes straight back to the first scene and deals with the theme of the covenant of circumcision leading to freedom and redemption. I’m avoiding “spoilers” for anyone who has not seen this film, but the story line self-revelation moment, both to the Hero and the audience is epic and powerful.

Story World, which mirrored the flaws and the Character Arc of the Hero, was a large part of the evolution of the story. It echoed the chaos, the destruction, the slavery of mankind at one of the world’s darkest moments.




French film with English subtitles
Genres: Drama/Historical Epic/Thriller

Premise according to imdb.com: A faithful retelling of the 1942 “Vel d’Hiv Roundup” and the events surrounding it. I would re-write this Premise: When a young, Christian nurse is caught up in the 1942 “Vel d’Hiv Roundup” in France, she risks her life to provide help and care to the mass of Jewish humanity destined for extermination.



I would change the Premise for the following reasons:

First of all, the audience comes to this film already knowing the ending of the tragic serial murder/genocide of the Jews in all of Europe during the rise of Adolf Hitler and his henchmen. So, to call this film a Holocaust story set in France does not do it justice. The genres are Drama/Historical Epic. What the writer added were elements of Thriller by transcending the usual story beats found in the Thriller genre.

Hitler as the Main Opponent remains a hidden Main Opponent by letting his henchmen and Nazi army of puppets and evil barbarians do his dirty work. His flawed and pathetic character are portrayed by showing him a slave of the drug needle; a music connoisseur, particularly Wagner – music to play in the background while plotting the destruction of European Jewry and or millions of Russians, Poles, Gypsies, mentally disabled, priests, political adversaries; his family is so very loving and he is a kind and devoted uncle and so reserved and elegant.

Hitler’s story world is juxtaposed to the story world of the French Jews: poor, patriotic (many had served France in WWI), acculturated, etc. Then there is the Hero of the story – a young, Christian nurse, the daughter of a pastor, who is swept up in the barbarity of this epic story.

Her character arc is brilliantly laid out for us: She begins as a novice and ends as a war weary, emotionally scarred righteous Gentile, whose love and caring were a paradigm for all the non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews. The doctor is the Point of View character, a Jewish man who certainly knows his own fate, yet a brave man who stayed with his children to protect them as much as humanly possible.

The Narrative Drive of the story was ramped up by the use of cross-cutting between the Hero and the Jews being rounded up and the Main Opponents – the Nazis, the head of the Vichy French government, their henchmen who brutally beat the Jewish civilians once they felt their antisemitic power had full backing by the regime that was now in power. The Reveal to the Audience is in play in this script in a very powerful way – We all know the horror that awaits the characters in the story – This knowledge puts the audience in the driver’s seat throughout –

Therefore, the surprises are historical and epic in nature: The firemen who acted like righteous humans when most of the world had gone mad; the actual plight of the French citizenry during the Roundup, never told with such accuracy before; the behavior of the French Gendarmes, who in many cases were as evil as the Nazis they colluded with. The historical revelations were honest and the dialog was honest, imbued with value systems and moral choices. No glossing over truth in this story.

Another great sign of a good story writer is that the message was not preachy. The characters in the travesty did NOT KNOW their end – The Final Solution is known to the audience – not to the characters. The Designing Principle, so important to storytelling, is that no matter what happens to human beings, they can somehow prevail, but there must always be those who are not afraid to come forward and “do the right thing.”

To be different, with a moral compass, in a sea of indifference – That’s the theme of this story. The writer stuck to that theme and imbued the Hero and supporting characters with this Desire Line throughout the story. All the way to the end, the Self-Revelation moment, this Designing Principle remained steady and purposeful.

And so, another story has been told about one of the darkest periods in human history – But the story was told by using transcending elements to Drama and Historical Epic. I might also add that the use of children as part of the Designing Principle was another beautiful decision on the part of the writer. The audience knows how this story ends before the movie begins, but the children carry the message even further because they are the future. So, the structure of this story was superb; the plot was written with depth and powerful Narrative Drive, the acting was stellar.