9/19/2023 0 Comments Sleeping dogs filmStead s novel Smith s Dream, Sleeping Dogs almost single-handedly kickstarted the New Zealand New Wave, demonstrating that homegrown feature films could resonate with both local and international audiences, and launching the big-screen careers of director Roger Donaldson (No Way Out, Species) and Sam Neill (Jurassic Park, Possession). However, the film offers a visceral insight into a society in which guilt, victimhood, and trauma are part of the fabric of everyday life.The 1977 New Zealand thriller SLEEPING DOGS Starring Sam Neill and Warren Oates will be available on Blu-ray from Arrow Academy on April 17thĪdapted from C.K. Hanna’s Sleeping Dogs can occasionally be a little heavy-handed with its metaphors, such as when Hanna literally wakes a sleeping dog. Seitz excels in her role as Hanna, and as the story unfurls almost entirely through the eyes of a child trying to make sense of her world, the audience is really made to feel the barely concealed hostility of life in the shadow of National Socialism. Gruber’s adaptation is powerful and confronting. The film eventually sees Hanna embrace her Jewish identity, and in so doing, empowers her family to begin to assert their place in their community. While Hanna’s mother’s secrecy about her heritage leaves Hanna ill-equipped to navigate these threats, her grandmother’s frankness allows her to begin to grapple with what it means to be Jewish in Europe after the Holocaust. As suspicions about her family’s origins grow, Hanna doesn’t understand why her school teacher and peers bully her, why she is terrorised by her building’s janitor, or why a respectable bank manager, used to exploiting Jewish women’s vulnerability during the Nazi era, tells her that her mother “could be friendlier” to him. Although Hanna’s family wants to leave their trauma in the past, other townsfolk haven’t put their brutalised wartime selves to bed, and Hanna, initially unaware of her Jewish identity, becomes the unwitting target of their hostility. Austria didn’t go through the same process of de-nazification as Germany itself did after the Second World War, and Gruber doesn’t flinch in examining the unresolved racial tensions and the sense of victimhood that wove themselves into Austrian post-war society. We see these tensions play out in the lives of 10-year-old Hanna (Nike Seitz), her mother (Franziska Weisz), a Jewish woman converted to Catholicism who lives by the motto “don’t stick out”, and her grandmother (Hannelore Elsner), who is increasingly impatient with the secrecy and repression that still control her family’s life.Īndreas Gruber’s film, an adaptation of Elisabeth Escher’s semi-autobiographical novel of the same name, is an interesting treatment of the legacy of National Socialism in Austria. Although over twenty years have passed since the fall of the Third Reich, wartime tensions still linger below the surface of everyday life. Hanna’s Sleeping Dogs ( Hannas schlafende Hunde) (2016) takes place in the Austrian town of Wels during the late 1960s, only a short distance from the Mauthausen Concentration Camp. They say that sleeping dogs should be let to lie, but history is never truely dormant. Where: German Film Festival at the Palace Nova Cinema Eastend What: Hanna’s Sleeping Dogs (Hannas schlafende Hunde)
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