David Reviews

An obscure commodity, powerful and sad. Lilienthal's film focuses on the plight of Fischel, a teenage Jewish boy whose family is caught in the midst of the Nazi atrocities. His rabbi father (Taub) sees his synagogue burned down by the Nazis, whose further desecrations include carving a swastika on top of his bald head. After his parents are forced to pay a shoemaker to hide their daughter (Mattes) in his shop, Fischel separates from his family, hides out, makes money doing odd jobs, and eventually is able to escape to Israel. Lilienthal, a German Jew, is part of a generation of German filmmakers who were children during the war years and are not afraid to look back at the inhumanity of the previous generation. Although DAVID is relatively unknown in America, it received a measure of success abroad in being named the best film of the 1979 Berlin Film Festival, beating out such better-known German pictures as Werner Herzog's NOSFERATU and Rainer Werner Fassbinder's THE MARRIAGE OF MARIA BRAUN.