Synopsis:
Austria, 1938. Alma Rosé, rising star of the European music scene and niece of Gustav Mahler, is leading a highly all women orchestra, and living a glamourous life with a promising future. But history tells a different story. For the next 5 years, Alma repeatedly escapes the Nazis, but is ultimately interned in the dreaded Auschwitz concentration camp, where she conducts an orchestra of women prisoners who perform for their captors to survive. This is the untold story of Alma, the almost 50 women she saves, the next generation and their descendants.
DIRECTOR’S NOTE
This film is about music, survival and the grey zone between memory and truth. The main thread is Alma’s story, her commitment to her craft as a professional musician; her will to survive and her commitment to create a professional orchestra at all costs, ultimately saving the lives of the women of the Auschwitz Orchestra.
But whereas it would be tempting to cast Alma in the heroic light of, say, Oskar Schindler, the story is never that clear. We will look at the inner dilemma Alma faced, or as the holocaust scholar Lawrence Langer once put it, her “choiceless choice”. Was Alma driven more by professional zeal? The will to survive? Compassion for others? Or a messy combination of all three?
The survivors’ memories tease together the threads, challenging each other. From the image of Alma as just another ‘German’ who entertains the SS, to the image of Alma as someone who does everything she could to save their lives and keep her dignity. Were the Nazis using the women or were the women using the Nazis?
- Francine Zuckerman, Director
Dance Me to the End of Love
By Leonard Cohen
“Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin
Dance me through the panic till I'm gathered safely in
Lift me like an olive branch and be my homeward dove
Dance me to the end of love
Dance me to the end of love”
♪“Dance me to the End of Love’…it’s curious how songs begin because the origin of the song, every song, has a kind of grain or seed that somebody hands you or the world hands you and that’s why the process is so mysterious about writing a song. But that came from just hearing or reading or knowing that in the death camps, beside the crematoria, in certain of the death camps, a string quartet was pressed into performance while this horror was going on, those were the people whose fate was this horror also. And they would be playing classical music while their fellow prisoners were being killed and burnt. So, that music, ‘Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin’ meaning the beauty there of being the consummation of life, the end of existence and of the passionate element in that consummation, But, it is the same language that we use for surrender to the beloved, so that song --- it’s not important that anybody knows the genesis of it, because if that language comes from that passionate resource, it will be able to embrace all passionate activity.”♪ -Leonard Cohen
Help us make Alma Rosé through the Film Collaborative in the US.
Connect with Alma Rosé
“Music takes you out into a different sphere. You get away from your horrible realities…You could lose yourself in music. Untouchable.”
- Anita Lasker Wallfisch, Survivor of Alma Rosé’s Auschwitz Women’s Orchestra
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