A new film brings the Holocaust home to America. The question of how Americans can possibly make sense of the Holocaust has gnawed at producer-director Sterling VanWagenen ever since he listened, as a child, to wartime stories recounted by two uncles who had fought in Germany and were thunderstruck by what they had witnessed. In 1986 VanWagenen, who is not Jewish, made "Inside the Vicious Heart," a documentary about how corn-fed American boys from Wyoming, Idaho and California had responded to the experience of liberating the Nazi death camps. And in his recently released feature film "Alan & Naomi," a love story set in the shadow of the Shoah, he again picks at the scab of a lifelong fascination with the Holocaust. Set in 1944, "Alan & Naomi" stars Lukas Haas (who played the title role in the 1985 thriller "Witness") as Alan Silverman, a 14-year-old Brooklyn boy. He is forced by his parents to befriend Naomi Kirschenbaum (screen newcomer Vanessa Zaoui), a French-Jewish girl rescued from Europe, who has just moved in with a neighbor. Naomi has been rendered practically catatonic after seeing her resistance-fighter father murdered by the Gestapo, and Alan is at first reluctant to be seen with "that crazy girl." Alan gradually breaks through Naomi's psychological shield, but their growing affection for each other spurs anti-Semitic jibes from a schoolyard bully. A violent incident triggers a severe relapse in Naomi, leaving both her and Alan with an uncertain future.
VanWagenen, 44, is the co-founder with Robert Redford of the Sundance Institute (for independent filmmaking) in Utah, and the producer of such critically acclaimed movies as "El Norte," "Promised Land," "Belizaire the Cajun," "Waiting for the Moon," and "The Trip to Bountiful." To direct "Alan & Naomi" (which screenwriter Jordan Horowitz adapted from Myron Levoy's 1977 novel), he first chose the Israeli-born Moshe Mizrahi, whose 1977 French production "Madame Rosa" won the Academy Award for best foreign film. But Mizrahi pulled out when another movie he was committed to make, was rescheduled. VanWagenen himself stepped into the breach, making his feature film-directing debut. "As a child in elementary school," recalls VanWagenen, "that whole phenomenon (of the Holocaust) seized my imagination. It was beyond anything I could have imagined on my own. How and why it happened, how incredulous everyone was, how far beyond our imaginative capabilities the camps were, are issues I can't shake." Working with a $ 3 million budget, VanWagenen shot "Alan & Naomi" last year in Wilmington, North Carolina, where it proved cheaper to recreate the story's 1940s Brooklyn setting using a non-union production team than the union crews required by New York law. The film opened nationally in early February to mixed reviews; Los Angeles Times film critic Michael Wilmington called it a "praiseworthy film, decent, sincere, compassionate, well-crafted." But he faulted the movie for a fastidiousness, both in its acting and production design, that he suggested evaded the true horrors of the Holocaust. But the director says he did not want to make a film that explicitly depicted the grisly spectacles seen in newsreels and recreated in other feature movies (a brief flashback of the murder of Naomi's father is the only direct representation of the Holocaust). VanWagenen subscribes to Elie Wiesel's belief in the basic indescribability of the Holocaust, and feels that to strive to literally recreate the impossible choices and indignities of that period on film is to induce an emotional paralysis that precludes thought and involvement. "The thing that attracted me to the script," he says, "was that it dealt with the Holocaust obliquely. For me, the real drama comes with the emotional and psychological impact it had on individuals. Here was a story of a girl made mute by her experiences. It was about two kids I thought people could be persuaded to care about." Although too soon to tell how "Alan & Naomi" will perform at the box office, VanWagenen expresses concern that even his movie's oblique approach to the Holocaust may be too much for some American moviegoers. "In enough conversations to be disturbing," says VanWagenen, "I hear people saying, This was 50 years ago - why don't the Jews leave it alone?' But I think there are dimensions of 20th century history that absolutely have to be kept alive. They've got to remain clear and present in our sensibility. The events were so seminal that to let them slip into the past would be a crime."