It is difficult to renounce the pleasure of a good story. After all, we are made of anything more than stories. We tell us stories to drive away the fears of the night, we tell us fun stories to fight the afternoon tedium and we tell ourselves the absurdity of dreams so that the dawn acquires meaning. ‘Misha and Los Lobos’, the documentary of the British Sam Hobkinson that after his presentation at the Seminci de Valladolid can be seen on the Movistar platform, is a good example of how the desire to believe in a story can everything; How the power of well-counted story captivates us to the saddest of deceptions. And yet, the relevant is not so much what was counted as what was counted on us. Indeed, it is not so much what the story tells but how the story tells us. And so. The stories, in effect, tell us. “We have a predisposition to believe that what they tell us is true,” says film director as a motto and prologue.
And now the story.
In the mid-1990s, an adorable neighbor of the small city of Millis in Massachusetts began to tell the neighbors of her life her.
She usually happens.
And the neighbors of her, between amazement and compassion, did not give credit.
The then already old man, she treated an unhappy childhood as, by force, all the children of the Second World War.
Misha Defonseca, this is her full name, he told her how her parents had been deported and how, in the fringe of infamy Nazi, she ended up in a family of adoption.
She also told about 7 years, unhappy among unhappy, she decided to go find the true parents of her heading to the unknown.
And she did it without being entrusted to anyone challenging the cold of winter and loneliness of the forests.
From Belgium to Germany.
And, despite everything, she survived.
And now the question: How?
Very easy.
A herd of wolves adopted it as one more.
During a good part of the documentary, the viewer is invited to discover a story something more than just surprising.
But also, more important, it is almost forced to believe it.
A neighbor who listened to Misha in Millis, owner of an editorial, decided that the story was too serious to run out of breath in the middle of a lost town.
And so the book ‘Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years’ appeared.
Soon, the success of an unsuccessful life would come and with it, the interviews, the drama drama drama on television, cries and chest blows.
The story of this woman was not only one of the most raw testimonies of barbarism but referred to the deepest of shared myths that places civilization itself before the mirror of its most intimate ruin.
And they know, nature, embodied in the wild child, is good.
“When you work with something so tremendous,” Hobkinson’s word again, “You realize that emotions force you to believe that something is true.”
In fact, the film plays with so much enthusiasm and little puddor to reveal before the spectator’s unbelievers the history of Misha that during a good part of the footage the feeling of astonishment is confused with that of shame.
Everything ends up soaking up from an inadmissible aesthetic and manipulation in the most tremendous episode of all.
We speak, do not forget, the Holocaust.
And so until in a twist of the already classic document ‘Capturing the Friedmans’, we fall into the account thanks to the modest, serious and nothing melodramatic testimonies such as Eveylne Haende, Survivor of the Shoah and Patient Documentalist, that all the above
It is nothing more than a fraud.
Misha Defonseca, like the man of the coma a few days ago and almost now, he just let himself be carried away by the enthusiasm he acknowledged at the passage of him.
Slowly, the documentary points to the viewer and also makes him accomplice.
And guilty next to those who counted such nonsense and made us cry with him.
“Actually,” says the director, “I never proposed to make a documentary about the Holocaust in a strict sense. But, as I was advancing, I realized that that was exactly what I was doing. Only it was a different guy from
Documentary on the Holocaust. It is one that deals with less about the horror in itself and more about the cultural shadow it has projected; over the entire book industry, films and newspapers with the survivor as protagonist and become simple melodramatic merchandise. ”
Seen in perspective and with the details of the story on the table everything seems so puully incredible that the question that arises is obvious: how did someone ever believe such a nonsense? But -and tours of schools, television settings and newspaper pages, we demonstrate it. And how. “What the film highlights is the ease with which the memories of the largest tragedy lived by humanity can be ‘stolen’ and reconverted with other purposes,” says filmmaker. And he adds: “While planning the film, I read ‘The Impostor’, Javier Fences, on the history of the appropriation of historical experience and memory similar to this one of Enric Marco. It seems that in the age of the ‘Fake News’ , the challenge is how to do to make sure that the ‘false memories’ do not tarnish the memory of the real experience. The problem of the stories of Misha Defonseca and Enric Marco is that they feed the fire of the Denators of the Holocaust convinced of interest that If a story is not true why believing in the others. ”
‘Misha and Los Lobos’ thus gets many films in one and all of them convinced from the power of the story to tell us.
Not the other way around.
It is a denunciation of the spectacularization of the tragedy as it is of claiming the anonymous and gray rigor.
It is a tape of detectives with the same clarity that ends up being the most tragic of comedies.
It is difficult to renounce the pleasure of a good story.
