Film Review Of Solomon Perel's 'Europa, Europa'

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Europa Europa
GET3930 and JST3930
December 2017

Introduction
The film Europa Europa, introduced in 1990, is set during the inception of World War II in Europe. Europa Europa (originally titled Hitlerjugen Salomon in its European release) is a film directed by award winning European director Agnieszka Holland gravitating around the story of Solomon Perel, played by Marco Hofschneider who plays Solly, and the real Solomon Perel played a very short but memorable part as well in the film as himself. Solomon was a handsome man of Jewish origins who through war circumstances became a German soldier, under Hitler’s reign and dogma of eliminating Jewish settlement from Europe.
Europa, Europa is a story of finding one’s self. The movie is about Solomon, the protagonist, or Solek, who during the Holocaust was separated from his family. To survives those horrendous times, Solek has to assume other identities, change his beliefs and hide who he is. As the movie was meant to appeal to a mass audience, it was widely criticized in Germany where the action was shot, but acclaimed in United States. In his article” Pretty Boys and Nasty Girls”, William Collin Donahue (2000) stipulate the possible reasons for the Germans criticism and the inability of the audience to …show more content…

It tells the “true” story of Salomon Perel, a young Jewish man trying to survive during World War II who eventually becomes a Nazi solider. Even if the appearance of the author of the memoir on which the film is based to assert the authenticity of the story was odd, especially in light of the fact that some of the events and situations in the film were exaggerated and in some cases completely fictional. It seems that the director was trying to justify the film, which was unnecessary. Mr. Perel, who unquestionably survived the war on the strength of his icy nerve, modestly casts himself more as Everyman than hero ( Engelberg,

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