No Place On Earth (Film) Review

No Place On Earth

Released: 5th April 2013
RRP: TBC
Director: Janet Tobias
Starring: Saul Stermer, Sam Stermer, Sonia Dodyk, Sima Dodyk, Yetta Stermer
Rating: PG-13
Running Time: 81

In October 1942, Esther Stermer, the matriarch of a Jewish family in the Ukraine, leads her family underground to hide from the pursuing Nazis - and stays nearly a year and a half. Their harrowing story of survival living in near total darkness in two cold, damp caves is one like no other ever told. It was life...like NO PLACE ON EARTH. (c) Magnolia

Ben Sachs (Chicago Reader) said:

"The movie is engaging but appallingly superficial when it considers the larger history of the Holocaust."

Michael Phillips (Chicago Tribune) said:

"The story told by Janet Tobias' documentary "No Place on Earth" is enough to transcend the film's limitations."

Gary Goldstein (Los Angeles Times) said:

"Add one more extraordinary survival tale to the canon of Holocaust documentaries: "No Place on Earth.""

John Anderson (Variety) said:

"A substantial contribution to Holocaust cinema."

Nicolas Rapold (New York Times) said:

"The film mixes emotional accounts by proud survivors from two families with foreign-language re-enactments that are perhaps too faithfully murky."

Farran Smith Nehme (New York Post) said:

"The film is built from moving, frank interviews with survivors from two families who hid, speaking over and around extensive re-enactments."

Sam Adams (AV Club) said:

"No Place On Earth mixes present-day interviews with re-enactments that illustrate the speakers' words without adding much to them."

David Fear (Time Out New York) said:

"This story is both uplifting and awe-inspiring. It deserves to be told better."

Lily Janiak (Village Voice) said:

"Unfortunately, the telling, by director Janet Tobias, is no match for the story."

Tina Hassannia (Slant Magazine) said:

"A remarkable story made almost unremarkable in the hands of lazy filmmaking."

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Dates in History

German forces cross the Somme River

24th March 1918

On March 24, 1918, German forces cross the Somme River, achieving their first goal of the major spring offensive begun three days earlier on the Western Front. Operation Michael, engineered by the German chief of the general staff, Erich von Ludendorff, aimed to decisively break through the Allied lines on the Western Front and destroy the British and French forces. The offensive began on the morning of March 21, 1918, with an aggressive bombardment. The brunt of the attack that followed was directed at the British 5th Army, commanded by General Sir Hubert Gough, stationed along the Somme River in northwestern France. This section was the most poorly defended of any spot on the British lines, due to the fact that it had been held by the French until only a few weeks before and its defensive positions were not yet fully fortified. Panic spread up and down the British lines of command, intensified by communications failures between Gough and his subordinates in the field, and German gains increased over the subsequent days of battle. On March 23, Crown Prince Rupprecht, on the German side of the line, remarked that The progress of our offensive is so quick, that one cannot follow it with a pen. The next day, German troops stormed across the Somme, having previously captured its bridges before French troops could destroy them. Despite having resolved to concentrate on weaker points of the enemy lines, Ludendorff continued to throw his armies against the crucial villages of Amiens (a railway junction) and Arras—which the British and French were instructed to hold at all costs—hoping to break through and push on towards Paris. By that time, German troops were exhausted, and transportation and supply lines had begun to break down in the cold and bad weather. Meanwhile, Allied forces had recovered from the initial disadvantage and had begun to gain the upper hand, halting the Germans at Moreuil Wood on March 30. On April 5, Ludendorff called off Operation Michael. It had yielded nearly 40 miles of territory, the greatest gains for either side on the Western Front since 1914. He would launch four more offensive pushes over the course of the spring and summer, throwing all of the German army’s resources into this last, desperate attempt to win the war. (www.history.com)

Further Reading

The Somme
(Paperback - 355 pages)
by Richard van Emden

The offensive on the Somme took place between July and November 1916 and is perhaps the most iconic battle of the Great War. It was there that Kitchener’s famous ‘Pals’ Battalions were first sent into action en masse and it was a battlefield where many of the dreams and aspirations… Read more at Pen & Sword...

Only £14.99 at Pen & Sword Books.

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