‘Germany, Pale Mother’ opens spring schedule

Since his retirement from Missouri Southern in 1997, Harrison Kash, director of the Missouri Southern Film Society, has been helping bring culture to the University.

Next month, the 49th Annual International Film Festival will continue at Southern.

The film, Germany, Pale Mother, based on the life of the film's director Helma Sanders-Brahms during World War II, will be the Festival's first film of the spring semester.

"She — as a child — lived through it and saw her parents suffer under it and how they went through the thing," Kash said. "This is a reflection of the things that happened to Germany during the war from her viewpoint, especially the feminist view point."

The director is not well known in cinema, but has cultural relevance.

"I think this first came to light in the 1980's but at that time I think they were just looking down on German cinema," he said. "The fact that German cinema was struggling, people just didn't believe in it very much. The once-great German cinema of the silent years and the early sound years was long gone."

It took many young directors to breathe life back into the art form in the country and Brahms was among the most notable, Kash said.

 One of the reasons he said the film has a place in film history because of the emotional aspect of the film. The story follows Brahms' brother who comes back from the Eastern front during the war. The film is filled with political rhetoric and family values.

"Everybody becomes a victim," Kash said "He goes into the army to fight on the eastern front and came back and he's an injured individual. You know how people are deep seeded affected by the trauma of that kind of thing."

The film also shows the indifference of the people at the time of the war, and focuses on the punishment of their indifference.

"The tragedy of this whole situation, of how they got caught in it and the complacency and the indifference and the fact that we'll follow the leader without question type thing—people didn't protest outrage," Kash said. "We have the results of all of these mistakes. It's pretty complex and does it on many levels."

Kash also said the aspect of other nationalities at the time being a focus of the film along with the tragedy of the aftermath is "an impressive part of it."

"They have aerial film footage of Berlin," he said. "I've never seen it before or news reels of it, but I cannot believe how they got that footage in there."

Germany, Pale Mother will be shown at 7 p.m. on March 1 in Cornell Auditorium. Admission will be free.