The Devil's Arithmetic
“She saw the truth with her own eyes.”
An American-born Jewish adolescent, Hannah Stern, is uninterested in the culture, faith and customs of her relatives. However, she begins to revaluate her heritage when she has a supernatural experience that transports her back to a Nazi death camp in 1941. There she meets a young girl named Rivkah, a fellow captive in the camp. As Rivkah and Hannah struggle to survive in the face of daily atrocities, they form an unbreakable bond.
Details
Release Date: 3/28/1999
Runtime: 95 minutes
Languages: English
Director: Donna Deitch
00Production
Companies: Lithuanian Film Studio, Punch Productions, Millbrook Farm Productions
Countries: Lithuania, United States of America
Where to watch · US
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Reviews
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Previously I had really enjoyed Donna Deitch's earlier lesbian romance period piece, 'Desert Hearts', and I had found Kirsten Dunst and Brittany Murphy amazing in 'Melancholia' and 'Sin City' respectively, but a TV-movie utilizing time-travel as a plot device for a spoiled Jewish teenager to come to grips with her heritage seemed quite a bold and intriguing cinematic experiment, not to mention being an entirely different can of worms than ever I've been privy to watching. Even though personally I have as little to do with Jewish customs as lesbian issues, like Deitch's earlier work, I was able to appreciate it, though I still prefer her earlier film, if I was held at gunpoint and had to rank the two. It's a crying shame, looking at Deitch's IMDb page, that this talented San Francisco native, now 71, has been relegated to basically doing TV episodes since this came out.
