Great Barrington — As a filmmaker and art activist, Julia Mintz points to her recently completed project as the most powerful she’s worked on to date. “It has an urgency and an importance like no other film I’ve worked on,” she told The Edge, speaking about FOUR WINTERS—in which the myth of Jewish passivity during the Shoah is shattered, revealing a stunning and inspiring narrative of heroism and resilience, via the voices of the last surviving partisans who tell their stories of resistance. The film, awarded Steven Spielberg’s Jewish Story Partners Documentary Film Grant and named best film at Toronto Jewish Film Festival, will make its New England premiere at a BIFF special screening on Tuesday, August 2, at 4 p.m. at the Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center; Partisan Michael Stoll, age 97 of Lenox, whose powerful story is featured in the film will be in attendance for a post-screening discussion with Mintz, the film’s director.
“It became so clear to me that I was now the vessel for this final telling of what [these partisans] have lived through and what their stories mean to our collective history,” Mintz said, having spent time in the homes of more than two dozen partisans—a term used to describe any of the more than 25,000 Jews who courageously fought back against the Nazis and their collaborators from deep within the forests of WWII’s Belarus, Ukraine, and Eastern Europe.
Mintz’s intention is not to shift the narrative. She remains adamant that the story of the Shoah is rooted in genocide, murder, and the brutality of hate, bigotry and ideology gone amok—not to mention six million beautiful human beings slaughtered. Rather, she sees opportunity, “to expand our understanding, to go through a new portal, [via] the experience of the Jewish partisans.” The result, she hopes, is a broader, more collective picture.
A very deliberate intention led the way: “to allow [the partisans] this final turn to be the keepers of their own history,” says Mintz who offers her audience a new perspective. Each partisan was torn from their families by the ravages of Hitler’s armies—men and women, many barely in their teens—before escaping into the forests and banding together in partisan brigades; they engaged in treacherous acts of sabotage (blowing up trains, burning electric stations, and attacking armed enemy headquarters), and, despite extraordinary odds, they survived.
Despite pushback and concern from the start—namely from funders who might have been more comfortable coming to the table had Mintz balanced her film with narration, historians, and experts—she ultimately stayed her course: Committing to telling the story solely through the partisan voices. As such, Mintz points to her greatest challenge: How to bring the stories of these individuals forward with integrity.
“[With] many films, [I’m] capturing a moment in time—in history—that’s fleeting, but it has to do with contemporary history, and [I] know that this story will continue to grow,” Mintz explained, pointing to the trajectory of other films she’s created. Not so with FOUR WINTERS.
Mintz researched, found, and ultimately spoke with more than two dozen partisans—spending time in their homes, listening to their stories, really getting to know them and understanding their respective journeys—who placed magnificent trust in her to be the conduit for their stories that will be told long into the future, “forever out in the world.” This approach, coupled with the 77th anniversary of the end of WWII looming (marked on September 2, 1945), equates to a powerful and timely telling of this tale.
FOUR WINTERS focuses on the same soil where people are bleeding today, fighting against fascism, which makes it a story of the war—but it’s a story of “these innocents who had to become soldiers in order to survive and fight back,” albeit against the most abominable, fierce enemy that was better armed and better sourced.
Someone once asked Mintz if the partisans had an impact. To this she replied: “It was a David and Goliath [situation], but the win was to live…and to save one’s life is to save the world. Right?”
Her goal, all along, was to inform history without distorting it—which is why she remains grateful this project came to her, but not at the start of her career. “It took me a very long time to create this story…because of the way I crafted it…[and] it was scary,” she admits, largely due to the enormous responsibility she felt to shed light on the experience of those who fought back.
“We know that ordinary individuals are often the ones who rise up against extraordinary odds and change the course of history,” Mintz says, acknowledging that—while our world would be a different place had the Holocaust not happened—this film provides a very unique opportunity for us to reflect and understand much through the lens of the people who survived the atrocities, “through a miracle of luck and fate, grit and determination, and—ultimately—skill and incredible courage and bravery. We not only learn about the partisans, but we [also] learn about the humanity that is within each of us.”
Mintz has now attended the funeral of more than one partisan and vividly recalls her last visit with one, in particular, at their home. It was Shabbat, the partisan took Mintz’s hands in her own, and declared: “The work is done; my story is yours.”
The crew packed up their video gear, loaded it into the elevator, where Mintz took a seat; as the doors closed, tears began to fall.
“It wasn’t sadness, it was just the understanding of the depth of the responsibility of what I had just committed to,” she recalls, pointing to the real profundity: “Each partisan knows they are a miracle, they know their survival is a miracle. And yet, in the witness of their own miracle of survival, they witnessed the unthinkable, the unspeakable, the unimaginable—and I allowed that to exist in the film.”
