For their HBO Max movie Survival, Describing Harry Huff’s real-life journey, a concentration camp prisoner forced to box to escape his captivity, director Barry Levinson and star Ben Foster both find strong connections to the story through their own families, as well as finding disturbing parallels with the current revelation. History
“I was about five years old and lived in a small house with my parents and my grandparents in the late 40’s, and a man appeared at the door,” Levinson recalled during Foster’s deadline competing television panel. “Her name was Simka and it turned out that it was my grandmother’s brother – and I never knew she had a brother – and they started talking to each other in a language I didn’t understand.”
Levinson recounts how his great-uncle was with the family for two weeks in the bedroom from a future filmmaker. “I woke up one night because he was beating in bed, he was speaking a language and he was screaming and he was tossing and turning and then he fell asleep again. And night after night. The same thing will happen. “
A few years after Simkar left, a teenage Levinson will learn the source of his relative’s troubles while talking to his mother. He says, ‘Well, you know Simka, when he was in concentration camp …’ I said, ‘He was in concentration camp?’ And then he started telling me a few things. “
Later, read the screenplay for Survival, Levinson was hurt while exploring the annoying echoes of trauma. “Those who survived the trauma – in this case, a prison camp – once it’s over, it’s ‘OK, OK, it’s done and now you take your life’.” Now we call it post-traumatic stress disorder; now we have a name for it. Fought. And if you win, you live another day; if you lose, basically, it’s your last – you’re dead. “
Huff escapes from the camp and travels to America, hoping to one day find his lost love, in the hope that by engaging in a public reward fight, he will attract her attention. “She is battling post-traumatic stress disorder,” Levinson explained. “And then the irony of all the ridicule is that Rocky Marciano, on his way to becoming a world champion, was a great fighter in the early 50’s – Harry Huff actually fought him. And so this journey … {My]primary connection was post-traumatic stress disorder. “
Foster found resonance with his own Romanian and Ukrainian grandparents next to his father, who had fled Europe in the 1920s to escape Russian pogroms. “It takes a lot of courage to leave your home with your family when your house is on fire, when it is being bombed, when people say you are being killed because we are looking for a safe haven somewhere else.” “Take that ship, go on that trip and say ‘We’re going.’ And we need to pay more attention to that lately. “
Levinson says he sees an immediate relevance to the current Russian war in Ukraine. “When you think you see all these people leaving for Ukraine and you say how many of them will be affected beyond what happened?” He said. “How long will it take to move forward, and how will you somehow move forward with your life? And it keeps repeating itself, and in that sense and for other things that happen in our lives when we are affected and we can’t deal with it now. “
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