What movie(s) changed your life or, at least, perspective?

It was 1993, and I was at drama school in NYC when Schindler’s List was released. I went to see it with some of my classmates, one of whom was a young and generally effusive German man of around 25. Afterwards everybody came back to my apartment for coffee and a discussion about the film and, particularly, the fantastic acting.

Our young German friend, who usually shared perceptive critical remarks about any film or play we went to, sat in silence in a kind of daze and it was only when he was asked outright for his opinion that he murmured, “They never told us.” When asked who “They” were, he said his parents and teachers.

I found it easy to believe that his parents hadn’t discussed the Hitler period, as, in common with the parents of German and Austrian friends I now have, his father was a member of the Nazi party and, of course, was in the army.

But I couldn’t believe that he had no knowledge of the Holocaust. I spoke to him privately about it the next day and he explained that while it had indeed been mentioned in history class, it had been glossed over in a few sentences and no-one had explained any of the details or the full horror that it entailed. And of course, his teachers were likely either former Nazis themselves, or offspring of such. Their country’s history was either to be denied completely or to be presented sparingly. It wasn’t exactly revisionist, but it sure wasn’t full disclosure. It wasn’t personal.

But the movie had opened his eyes and he went on to become a voracious reader of books about Hitler and his Final Solution.

So the movie itself changed his life, but it also changed and illuminated my perspective of the power that filmmaking (and culture in general) has to illustrate and teach about life.