The Devil's Arithmetic (1999)
An American-born Jewish adolescent, Hannah Stern, is uninterested in the culture, faith and customs of her relatives. However, she begins to revaluate her heritage when she has a supernatural experience that transports her back to a Nazi death camp in 1941. There she meets a young girl named Rivkah, a fellow captive in the camp. As Rivkah and Hannah struggle to survive in the face of daily atrocities, they form an unbreakable bond.
- Donna Deitch
- Robert J. Avrech
- Jane Yolen
Rating: 6.8/10 by 96 users
Alternative Title:
La aritmética del diablo - AR
Matemática do Diabo - BR
Vivencias de la guerra - ES
Deutschland 1941 - Des Teufels Rechnung - DE
Country:
Lithuania
United States of America
Language:
English
Runtime: 01 hour 35 minutes
Budget: $0
Revenue: $0
Plot Keyword: based on novel or book, nazi, tradition, holocaust (shoah), rabbi, poland, death, woman director
Previously I had really enjoyed Donna Deitch's earlier lesbian romance period piece, 'Desert Hearts', and I had found Kirsten Dunst and Brittany Murphy amazing in 'Melancholia' and 'Sin City' respectively, but a TV-movie utilizing time-travel as a plot device for a spoiled Jewish teenager to come to grips with her heritage seemed quite a bold and intriguing cinematic experiment, not to mention being an entirely different can of worms than ever I've been privy to watching. Even though personally I have as little to do with Jewish customs as lesbian issues, like Deitch's earlier work, I was able to appreciate it, though I still prefer her earlier film, if I was held at gunpoint and had to rank the two. It's a crying shame, looking at Deitch's IMDb page, that this talented San Francisco native, now 71, has been relegated to basically doing TV episodes since this came out.
