After selecting a building at random in a Jewish neighborhood in Paris, French director Ruth Zylberman meticulously reconstructed its community of inhabitants during the German occupation.  What results is the spellbinding 209 RUE SAINT-MAUR, an experimental historiography that tells the emotional story of lives uprooted and destroyed under the Nazis.

The Children of 209 Saint-Maur Street

Gustave Folcher, a French farmer, wrote in his 1939 diary that the summer had been long and hot. He was not alone. Many other anonymous French men and women wrote of the beauty and warmth of those summer months and how threats of war were far from their minds.  Through home movies, diaries and letters, One Last Summer describes the final weeks of peace in France and the mix of blindness, denial and prophetic clear-sightedness of those facing the war that was about to unfold.

France 1939: One Last Summer

The new documentary made from the Slánský trial film and audio archives found by chance in 2018 in a warehouse in the suburb of Prague served as a starting point for the film. The director tells the trial through the descendants of three of the condemned: the daughter and grandson of Rudolf Slánský, the son and granddaughter of Rudolf Margolius, both executed after the trial, and the three children of Artur London, sentenced to life imprisonment.