WE WANT THE LIGHT

A film by Christopher Nupen

with:
Vladimir Ashkenazy, Daniel Barenboim
Leon Botstein, Margaret Brearley
Michael Haas, Elyakim Ha’Etzni
Evgeny Kissin, Norman Lebrecht
Zubin Mehta, Itzhak Perlman
Toby Perlman, Paul Lawrence Rose
Alice Sommer, Jacques Stroumsa
Uri Toeplitz, Anita Lasker-Wallfisch
Yirmiyahu Yovel, Pinchas Zukerman

The title is taken from a poem by a 12-year-old girl, Eva Pickova, written in the Theresienstadt concentration camp. Her words provide both the title and the climax—in a setting for two choruses and orchestra by the American composer Franz Waxman, in his touching work The Song of Terezin.

It is a film is about many things. It is about freedom and captivity, about emancipation, acculturation and assimilation; it is about the roles played by Moses and Felix Mendelssohn in the dream of fruitful, unproblematic integration of the Jews into German society after their liberation from the ghettos; it is about Richard Wagner, his ferociously anti-Semitic essay Das Judenthum in der Musik (The Jews in Music) and his influence on the thinking of the Third Reich but, most of all, it is a film about how much music can mean to people, even in the direst of circumstances, or particularly in the direst circumstances.

Picture format: NTSC 16:9 anamorphic
Sound format: Dolby Digital 2.0
Region code: 0 (worldwide)
Subtitles: English, French, German, Spanish
Running time: 330 mins
No. of DVDs: 2