DENIAL IS A LAW SCHOOL TEXTBOOK CASE FOR LIBEL
On April 11, 2000, a British judge issued a landmark ruling on academic libel case in which David Irving (played by Timothy Spall), a British historian denying the Holocaust, sued Deborah Lipstadt (Rachel Weisz), an Emory University professor. Based on her book History on Trial: My Day in Court with a Holocaust Denier (2005), the film traces the origin of the lawsuit from a time when Irving enters Lipstadt’s classroom at Emory to vehemently question her claim of the existence of the Holocaust, holding up a copy of his book on the subject. He claims that libel occurred in her rejection of his claim in her book Denying the Holocaust (1993). He files his case, Irving v Penguin Books, against Lipstadt and her publisher in London during 1996. When the case goes to trial before a judge, he appears largely on his own behalf, without the intervention of his counsel, whereas she engages a team of barristers headed by Richard Rampton (Tom Wilkinson). In preparation for the case, she and the team visit Auschwitz and assemble many documents. The trial serves as a learning experience for Lipstadt, who has to prove her innocence of the charge (rather than presumed innocent until proven guilty). What the barristers explain is that the legal burden of proof in a libel case within Britain falls on the defendant to prove that the Holocaust in fact did occur by presenting evidence to show that Irving’s contentions (also based on documentation) are not only false but deliberately twist forensic evidence to suit his anti-Semitic prejudice. Testimony by a Holocaust survivor, in other words, is irrelevant and could easily be contradicted. (If a former Nazi prisoner claims that a door was on the left when photographs indicate that the door was on the right, the testimony would be useless and counterproductive.) Irving, meanwhile, firmly believes that he has undertaken dispassionate research and that he is not an anti-Semite. The outcome of the case is obvious, so the suspense is about how her defense impressed the judge through meticulous presentation of evidence to contradict Irving’s interpretation of photographic evidence. Directed by Mick Jackson, Denial has been nominated by the Political Film Society for best film exposé of 2016. MH
COME WHAT MAY ANSWERS CRITICS OF ADMITTING SYRIAN REFUGEES
Many politicians question the current policy of admitting Syrians who are fleeing from a brutal civil war. Yet they may have forgotten that the French, expecting the German military to take over northern parts of their country, fled south in droves with no expectation of where they would end up or how they would be able to survive. Come What May (En mai, fais ce qu’il te plait) brings that tragedy to the screen, based on accounts of survivors. To humanize the dramatization, director Christian Carion focuses on two families—the mayor of Pas-de-Calais and his spouse as well as a father and son who had recently escaped from Germany and had been welcomed to live in the same town. After the townspeople leave their homes, German airplanes quickly overfly them, dropping bombs, and German tanks slide past them as they travel. Several subplots make the story especially poignant, a depiction of how the French coped with dignity. MH