The hour-long version of Bob Hercules of Media Process Group and Cheri Pugh’s documentary “Forgiving Dr. Mengele” is back in production since obtaining a total of $26,000 in finishing funds from various foundations.
Hercules and Pugh screened a rough cut of the doc at the IFP/Chicago Filmmakers Conference last October, when the project was stalled after four years in production.
International sales agent CS Associates had shopped the doc at the Cannes Market. Hercules said they aim for a North American premiere at the Toronto Film Festival in September.
“Our goal domestically is to have a theatrical run, and go to TV after that,” Hercules said. “I’ve never done it before, it’s totally new to Cheri and me. But I do feel it’s the kind of film that could play in theaters. It’s a very personal story with a lot of drama.”
“Mengele” is the story of Eva Mozes Kor, a Holocaust survivor who has taken the contentious step of publicly forgiving the Nazis as part of her own healing process.
Kor and her late sister Miriam were Mengele twins, subjected to geneticist Josef Mengele’s experiments at Auschwitz. At age ten, the girls led the line of prisoners leaving the camp when it was liberated by the Soviets in 1945.
Now a real estate agent in Terra Haute, Indiana, Kor runs that state’s only Holocaust museum, CANDLES. “Forgiving” follows her life from the camps, through her 1995 personal declaration of amnesty for Nazi perpetrators, and up to the 60th anniversary liberation ceremony at Auschwitz last January.
“That ended up being the closing of the film,” Hercules said. “It was a very moving scene, in a gas chamber, she’s passing the torch to her son Alex. The story has to continue to be told so it can never be repeated. That’s the urgency of it.”
Finishing funds were providced by the Seligman Family Foundation of Detroit, Kodak’s Eastman Fund, and the Korber Foundation of Germany.
