Holocaust story, German point of view

When Meyer Gottlieb saw Rosenstrasse last September at the Toronto Film Festival, he did something he hardly ever does: As the picture ended, the president of Samuel Goldwyn Films - whose business is to finance, acquire and distribute movies - just remained in the theater, too moved to move.

"I just sat there, I didn't say anything," recalls Gottlieb, who shortly thereafter bought the distribution rights to Margarethe von Trotta's German-language Holocaust drama. Rosenstrasse, a fictionalized account of a true event, opened Friday at the Ritz at the Bourse and Ritz Sixteen/NJ.

"I'm a child survivor, so it had profound meaning for me," explains the veteran film exec, who was born, in 1939, in a shtetl in Poland and spent most of World War II in a work camp in the Ukraine.

Von Trotta's film is based on a little-known incident in 1943 Berlin:

Hundreds of Jewish men who believed themselves to be safe because they were wed to "Aryan" Germans were unexpectedly rounded up and held for transport to concentration camps. The wives and family members gathered outside the building - on a small street, Rosenstrasse - and staged a vigil and protest that resulted in the men's safe release. The act of defiance by German citizens against the Nazi regime saved the lives of hundreds of Jews.

"It leaves you reflecting on what could have been," Gottlieb says of the film. "And what should have been. Instead of having several hundred German women protesting, what if there had been 100,000 or 200,000? What could have been accomplished [and] how history would have been changed and how many more Jewish lives would have been saved?"

Rosenstrasse, which is set in both modern-day New York and wartime Berlin, involves a young woman's investigation into her mother's childhood in Germany and the trauma she experienced. Both a love story and a Holocaust story, the PG-13 film stars Maria Schrader (Aimee and Jaguar), Katja Riemann (Bandits), and Jurgen Vogel (Smilla's Sense of Snow). It is, Gottlieb says, one of the rare Holocaust films that is told entirely from the Germans' perspective.

"I think Margarethe von Trotta did an incredible job. I'd never seen a film where you saw the war, and the impact the Nazi agenda had, from the point of view of ordinary Germans."

Gottlieb has lived in the United States since 1949 - moving here from a U.S.-controlled displaced-persons camp in postwar Germany.

"I try to live my own life in the belief that love and tolerance and courage can conquer evil, but it's hard, it's really hard, because of what happened to me and my family," he says. "I lost my father, a baby brother, all of my grandparents, seven of 11 aunts and uncles, and that all happened at the hands of Germans. The question that I have a difficult time living with is how is it possible that so many so-called good Germans stood silent? It's a question that I live with without answers. It's painful."

Short subjects. Speaking of different sorts of Holocaust stories, Sean Connery has signed on to star in Josiah's Canon, a heist movie with a Holocaust motif: It's about a concentration-camp survivor-turned-bank-robber who sets his sights on a supposedly impenetrable Swiss bank said to be rich from money deposited by Jews before the war. Brett Ratner (Red Dragon) will direct. . . . Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro, who played stepson and stepdad in the none-too-happy This Boy's Life and worked together again in 1996's Marvin's Room, are reteaming for The Good Shepherd. De Niro will direct the picture (only his second turn at the job, after 1993's A Bronx Tale), the story of the CIA as seen through the eyes of one of the spy org's founding agents. . . . Eddie Murphy has a deal at DreamWorks to star in an untitled western spoof, described as a kind of a Blazing Saddles for the new millennium (exactly what the world needs right now, too!). . . . British actress and two-time Oscar nominee Samantha Morton (Sweet and Lowdown, In America) has signed to star in a biography of famed photographer Diane Arbus. She'll also play another real-life figure, To Kill a Mockingbird author Harper Lee, in a movie about Truman Capote. . . . A verbatim tidbit from Variety: Jenna Elfman and Samantha Mathis have joined Touched, a romantic drama about "a man who wakes from a coma without his sense of touch and the nurse who helps save him." He wakes up without his sense of touch and without the nurse, too?! Randall Batinkoff, who played Hugh Hefner in a 1999 TV biopic, is the unfortunate tactile-deprived, nurseless hero. . . . Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid's starlet (and University of the Arts grad, and subject of last Sunday's column, and actress with annoying upper-case letter in her name) KaDee Strickland has nabbed a key role in Fever Pitch, based on Nick Hornby's nonfictioner about fervent English football fans. Strickland will join Ione Skye, Drew Barrymore and Jimmy Fallon in the Farrelly Brothers' project, which has been Americanized by making the sport baseball instead of soccer.

Media festival. The Media Theatre in Media, site of many a live Broadway musical, is now home to the Media Film Festival too.

The inaugural screen series runs Thursday through Saturday at the historic venue on downtown State Street. The lineup includes Michael Moore's classic doc, Roger and Me, and his current, mildly controversial hit, Fahrenheit 9/11. Other titles on the slate: Philadelphia filmmaker Max Raab's award-winning Mummers documentary, Strut!; Philly filmmaker Eugene Martin's The Other America, about homeless teens, starring Irene Longshore and Tobias Segal; and the film-festival-circuit hit Invisible Mountains, by Media native Richard Hoffman. That movie, some of which was shot in and around Media, and which deals with the struggles of a young artist, will open the new film fete Thursday evening.

For information on times and tickets, click on www.mediatheatre.com or call 610-891-0100.

Contact movie critic Steven Rea at 215-854-5629 or srea@phillynews.com. Read his recent work at http://go.philly.com/stevenrea.