Holocaust remembrance and Mr. Robot marathon

This week on TV.

By HANNAH BROWN
NO ASYLUM: The Untold Chapter of Anne Frank’s Story. (photo credit: Courtesy)
NO ASYLUM: The Untold Chapter of Anne Frank’s Story.
(photo credit: Courtesy)
Holocaust Remembrance Day, which takes place from May 4-5 this year, will be commemorated by special programming on several networks.
Among the many programs Channel One is the Second Look news magazine on May 4 at 9:20 p.m., which will examine the struggles of Holocaust survivors in Israel. This issue, unfortunately, is constantly in the news, as the survivors are forced to battle the bureaucracy in order to receive their benefits.
On May 4 at 6 p.m., Larry Price’s The Chabad Rebbe and the German Officer will be shown. It tells the story of the rescue of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Yosef Yitzchak Schneerson, from war-torn Warsaw in 1939 by the half-Jewish German spy, Major Ernst Bloch.
Claude Lanzmann: Spectres of the Shoah, the Oscar-nominated short documentary by Adam Benzine, will be shown at 9 p.m.
on May 5. Lanzmann looks back on the arduous process of writing, directing, researching and editing his most famous documentary, Shoah. The film celebrates the 30th anniversary of the release of Shoah.
HOT is featuring a number of Holocaust films on the HOT Gold Channel, among them Ed Zwick’s Defiance on May 4 at 7:39 p.m.
Defiance tells the story of the Bielski brothers, who fled into the Belorussian woods and joined Russian resistance fighters.
Eventually, they built a village that housed one thousand Jews. It stars Daniel Craig (best known as James Bond) Li ev Schreiber (best known as Ray Donovan from the television series), and Jamie Bell (best known for the title role in Billy Elliot) as the brothers.
YES VOD will show a number of movies, among them No Asylum: The Untold Chapter of Anne Frank’s Story, directed by Paula Fouce. It will begin airing at 9 p.m. on May 4 and will also be broadcast on the YES Docu Channel on 10:30 p.m. on May 6.
The movie is based on a cache of letters written by Otto Frank, Anne’s father, that were discovered in the YIVO archives in 2005. Between 1941 and his arrest in 1944, Otto Frank tried to get visas by writing to an old college friend, Nathan Straus Jr., son of a Macy’s department store co-owner and head of the U.S.
Housing Authority. They petitioned the National Refugee Service in New York and the Boston Committee for Refugees as well as the State Department in Washington, D.C., but they could never provide the complete list of required documents.
Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List won seven Oscars, among them Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Cinematography. After the release of the gruesomely realistic Son of Saul a few months ago, Schindler’s List looks very much like a Hollywood film but the performances of Liam Neeson and Ralph Fiennes are still excellent.
The Oscar-winning 2014 Polish drama, Ida, will also be shown.
Like Schindler’s List, it’s in black and white, and it is basically a two-character movie with an intense but intimate story: A young nun, about to take her final vows in the early 60s, discovers that she is Jewish, and joins her Communist-Party member aunt on a search for her parents’ graves.
The television series, Mr. Robot, was the surprise winner of the Golden Globe for Best Television Drama (as well as a Best Supporting Actor Golden Globe for Christian Slater). The second season, which is coming up in June, will be broadcast on Cellcom TV, which already broadcast the first season. Now, it will also be available on HOT.
All the episodes of the first season will be shown in a marathon on HOT Plus starting on May 11 at 9 p.m., as well as on HOT VOD.
The series, which is about a young hacker with social anxiety played by Rami Malek, who fights shadowy global corporations, can be described as The Matrix meets Homeland meets Silicon Valley.