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Year: 2001-TV Movie
Director: Jon Avnet Synopsis: Jon Avnet’s made-for-TV movie, Uprising is about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943. The film shows haunting images of Europe’s Jews plodding, like sheep, to their deaths in Nazi concentration camps. The film begins with the growing list of prohibitions and regulations leading to the virtual imprisonment of about half-a-million Polish Jews in an old slum district of Warsaw with inadequate space and plumbing. An overhead tracking shot shows the number of people assembled in the first months of the relocation. The daily struggle against hunger and disease, especially among the dispossessed arrivals seen in their pitful rags, is aggravated by the German demands for “deportations to the east” that many begin to suspect are camouflaged mass murders. |
By the close of 1942, people living in the ghetto realize they are doomed, and the rudiments of resistance are planned by a handful of the young, including Edelman. Following some sporadic, spontaneous fighting at the ghetto rail head, the Umschlagplatz, in January, led by Moredecai Anielewicz, the scene is set for the more famous and prolonged battle that will begin on 19 April 1943. In the intervening time, many of the ghetto residents construct hidden shelters or bunkers in the basements and cellars of the buildings, often with tunnels leading to other buildings. The handful of fighters who have weapons take to these shelters, giving the uprising the advantage of defensive positions. It was filmed in multiple locations, including Bratislava, Slovakia and Innsbruck in Tyrol, Austria.
Role: Simcha “Kazik” Rotem – born Szymon Rathajzer, (aka – Kazik) a a member of the Jewish underground in Warsaw. He served as the head courier of the Jewish Fighting Organization (ZOB), which planned and executed the Warsaw ghetto uprising against the Nazis.
What Stephen Moyer says about Uprising:
On Jon Avnet -”I love working with him. When somebody comes to the party with as much energy and as much enthusiasm as he does … he shoots everything as if it’s The Godfather.”
