Part of Freedom of Expression Award: Péter Forgács

Freedom of Expression Award presentation with Péter Forgács follows the San Francisco screening.

Lisl Goldarbeiter was an especially attractive Jewish teenage girl living in Vienna in the 1920s who eventually was crowned Austria’s first—and only—Miss Universe. Her Hungarian cousin and childhood friend, Maritz (Marci) Tenczer, had followed her to Vienna with two equal obsessions: his movie camera and Lisl. Now, with the distance of nearly eight decades, SFJFF Freedom of Expression Award winner Peter Forgacs weaves together Tenczer’s vivid memories and the precious home movies of his gorgeous cousin into a film that says as much about the power of abiding unrequited love as about the dramatic life of Lisl herself.

It was cousin Marci who, unbeknownst to Lisl, had submitted her application to the prestigious pageant that she eventually won in Galveston, Texas. Soon the shy, serious girl was an international sensation, with the possibility of an American modeling career (we are treated to clips of one of the earliest talking films, a press conference with Lisl, who speaks in formal, halting English, charmingly undercut here by outtakes). Cousin Marci was with her all along, filming from a distance, proud and smitten. But Lisl married a bon vivant and returned to Europe during the gathering storm of fascism. Forgacs’s unique style of reworking of amateur home movies is here deployed to reveal not only a story of lives ruptured by forces of history, but also the triumph of survival and (big surprise) even the occasional happy ending.

—Peter L. Stein

Sponsored by Jane Gottesman & Geoffrey Biddle

Co-presented by Contemporay Jewish Museum