CineMatinee March 2008
A potpourri of movies, past and present, often with an emphasis on life in the west- which could mean the new west, the old west, or anything in between-the CineMatinee series is designed to show area residents that film is a form of art as well as entertainment! At least one film a month for this series has a ‘New Mexico Connection’, drawing from the vast pool of movies made in the state or perhaps featuring a star/story from New Mexico talent.
Unless otherwise noted, screening time is 1.30 PM, and admission is $4 for everyone except film society members who are admitted for $1. The theatre is located one half block of the Mesilla Plaza. For more information, please call 524-8287 or 522-0286.
March 29- Steal a Pencil for Me - (2007- 94 minutes) Steal a Pencil for Me is a terrific documentary about forbidden love in the most heinous of places. Jaap Polak and Ina Soep's courtship serves as not only a story about these two people's lives but also as a testament to survival and the horrors of the Holocaust.
What makes this documentary about the Holocaust stand out is that it's two parallel stories - the love story and a description of Dutch Jews before and during World War II.
The movie opens with the couple celebrating 60 years of marriage in New York. Soep is still a beauty in her 80s, and Polak is a lively 90-year-old.
Polak came from a lower-middle-class Jewish family while Soep grew up as a child of wealth - her father was a diamond merchant. If not for the laws that persecuted the Jews, the two would probably never have met. Their first meeting was at a party, and Polak was smitten. But he was married - although he planned to get a divorce after the war.
It wasn't until the two went to "model" transit camp Westerbrook that they fell in love for real. After Polak's wife found out, she told Soep to stay away from her husband, but the two began a correspondence. Eventually all three ended up at the death camp Bergen-Belsen (where Anne Frank died), and somehow Polak and Soep continued their letter writing. Soep landed a job as a stenographer and had access to pencils. When Polak was down to his last stubs, he asked her to steal pencils.
Most of Polak's letters and some of Soep's survived, and what were written in them were not only love notes, but vivid descriptions of the abominations and degradations they had to endure every day. The couple, along with friends and family survivors, elaborates on what it was like to be a Dutch Jew during those years. So many documentaries about the Holocaust have been shown before. One would think we've seen enough. Steal a Pencil for Me proves we can never learn too much.
