Forgiveness (2008 film)
| Forgiveness | |
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Film poster as Esther's Diary
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| Directed by | Mariusz Kotowski |
| Produced by | Gilda Longoria Mariusz Kotowski |
| Screenplay by | Allan Knee |
| Story by | Mariusz Kotowski |
| Starring |
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| Music by | Federico Chavez-Blanc |
| Cinematography | James Rodriguez |
| Edited by | Brian O'Neill |
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Production
company |
Bright Shining City Productions
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Release date
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Running time
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84 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
Forgiveness , also known as Esther's Diary, is a 2008 American dramatic Holocaust film written and directed by Polish-American director Mariusz Kotowski, with a screenplay by Allan Knee. The film is marked as being the director's first feature-length film.
A Roman Catholic child Apollonia Kowalski and a Jewish child Esther Blumenfeld, were childhood best friends in 1940's Poland. The two girls were separated when Esther was taken away to a Nazi concentration camp. When the war ended, both girls separately emigrated to the United States with their families. They remained separated thereafter.
Years later, Apollonia's daughter Maria Patterson (Shelley Calene-Black) and Esther's daughter Sarah Blumenfeld (Sydney Barrosse), have become successful professional women, but each still deals with the memories of the Holocaust via strained relationships with their respective mothers. Esther dies but has left a memoir of her experiences in the camp with her daughter, Sarah. Apollonia (Juli Erickson) is confined to a nursing home and, though Maria tries her best to care or her, she and her mother are at constant odds. A secret that Apollonia has been hiding comes to light, and the uncovering of this secret causes Apollonia and Maria to resolve their differences and brings Maria and Sarah into each other's lives.
The film's story is told through a series of narratives from a fictional memoir of the period, illustrated with archival footage provided by the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, Oświęcim, Poland, additional archive material from the Jewish Historical Institute, and photographs of the concentration camp ruins by Michael Kenna. Some of the film's archival footage comes from the same sources used in the French short film Night And Fog.
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