"The White Rose"
Director: Shana Furlow
www.shanafurlow.com

European backlot at Universal Studios

Synopsis

The film is set in Germany in 1935. A ten-year-old girl, Eva, and her family witness an older woman taunting a Jewish family at an outdoor cafe. The gathering crowd watches on with amusement. Eva's initial delight at the spectacle is replaced with confusion when the taunts grow increasingly more humiliating.

Suddenly she senses the competing worldviews this scene provokes in others -- everything from laughter to disgust and apathy. Yet no one steps in for the family. Just as Eva begins to identify and empathize with the family's terrified young son, violence erupts unimpeded by anyone. The boy watches helplessly as his father is beaten, and his horror becomes Eva's horror. She finally looks to her father to help, and when Arthur refuses to get involved, Eva's perfect faith in him is lost.


Understanding the Holocaust

"Mr. Dorman [a Holocaust documentarian] believes it is time to pay more attention to the perpetrators. Film, he says, has proved "an ideal medium" for allowing the victims to tell their stories, but where, he wonders, are the far more complex stories of the criminals? Books have been written about them … yet filmmakers have exhibited a greater reluctance than historians to examine this aspect of the Holocaust. Perhaps they are fearful of humanizing the inhuman."

By Barry Gewen
"Holocaust Documentaries: Too Much of a Bad Thing?"
New York Times. February 15, 2003

Read more about how The White Rose explores this territory...
Thank you so much for your help with this production!

Please review the current draft of credits.


Materials

  • FULL SCRIPT

  • Visual plan

  • Sound design plan

  • Sample music clips that are guiding my thoughts on sound (a chant and music from Seven Years in Tibet).

  • Production location at Universal Studios

    I'll add other materials to this space as time permits, including quicktime videos of my two other short films, Namaste and The Fitting.


  • © Copyright 2006 - Shana Furlow