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DARK SIDE

By Natalie ASSOULINE

FIRST HAND FILMS - as SALES / PROD

Documentary - Completed 2013

Moshe is a survivor. His family was murdered when he was 13 years old. For years he stayed in the forest with the Partisans, surviving brutal fighting with the Russian army against the Nazis. He did what many survivors only dared to dream of, he got revenge.

- Year of production
- 2013
- Genres
- Documentary, Historical
- Countries
- ISRAEL
- Languages
- HEBREW
- Duration
- 52 mn
- Director(s)
- Natalie ASSOULINE
- Producer(s)
- Talia KLEINHENDLER (Pie Films)
- Synopsis
- “I don’t remember the first man I killed…. but I remember his shoes because they hurt my feet for months…”
  
  Moshe is a survivor. His family was murdered when he was 13 years old. For years he stayed in the forest with the Partisans, surviving brutal fighting with the Russian army against the Nazis. Something though makes Moshe different from other survivors. He did what many only dared to dream of, he got revenge. Moshe doesn’t apologize for it, or make excuses, he says he did what he had to do to survive, and then to go on living.
  
  Now, at the age of 85, Moshe brings his three adult children back to the Polish town where he was born, to the only place that ever was home, and tells his story. A boy turning into a man. The evolution of revenge. Moshe’s children have to try and make sense of the father they idolized their whole life.
  
  They end up asking everybody's impossible question – what would I have done?
  
  Moshe’s children have heard stories about their father all their lives. About his family being murdered during the Holocaust. About how Moshe's friends and neighbors turned his family in to the Nazis. About how he hid in the woods with the partisans and survived. Moshes's children always knew not to ask too much about what happened next.
  
  After the war, Moshe went back to Poland and took revenge on those responsible for killing his family. He joined the UB, the Polish secret police, a group that operated in Poland after the war with the purpose to fight those opposing the Communist regime, yet in secret they avenged victims and killed Nazis and their collaborators.
  
  Moshe speaks frankly about it, dryly, as if it were the sanest thing anyone could do, as though he is still amazed that not more people did it.
  
  Moshe's children each know bits and pieces of the story, and perhaps never wanted to know. Now Moshe wants them to tell them all. The whole family travels together to the village in Poland where it all began, and ended.
  
  Using animation created by Animator Yoni Goodman (Waltz With Bashir, The Congress), the film recreates Moshe’s memories as he walks through the streets of this village, recreating his children’s imaginations of their once childlike view of their father, and tells the untold story of the dark side of revenge.