The Girl Who Cried Wolf

Another Holocaust film, but you've not seen one like this:

 “As we were going along, I thought a lot about why Holocaust narratives have attracted so many hoaxes,” Hobkinson says. “I hope this comes through in the film, that the story Misha told was pretty out there. But the context from which she tells it, her own experiences as a young Jewish girl during the Holocaust, make it very difficult to question. The thing that protected her, that made her hard to question, was the place of authority from which she was telling it. Potentially, that’s why more Holocaust hoax narratives have slipped through, because it’s a sort of sacred ground. Far be it from me to question someone sharing these horrible experiences they’ve gone through.”

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“We had this idea of folding in untruths to the telling of the story,” he says. “We wanted the film-making to reflect that artifice, and we sought out devices that could assist in that. But in simple terms, for documentary film-making, the viewer needs to leave the cinema – or finish streaming the series, whatever you’re doing – armed with all the information there is to know. Along the way, to make the telling more interesting and representative of this story’s themes, I think it’s fair game to hold things back and misdirect the audience. As long as you’ve delivered everything you know on the subject once all is said and done.”

He does just that with the assistance of the self-appointed investigators who trawled file cabinets and library shelves for proof of Defonseca’s claims – or proof of their falsehood. Hobkinson saw the ethically shady Defonseca and her exploitative publisher as “flawed, complex characters,” leaving the protagonist role to one Evelyne Haendel, a fellow Belgian survivor and “hidden child” resentful of the idea that someone could turn the components of her own trauma into a lucrative fib. The flinty old woman was at first reluctant to participate in the production and relive events from years earlier, but once she did, she was “open and committed” in sharing both her recollections and her reflections on them. Now, the film acts as an unwitting tribute to her memory; she died of lung cancer a few months after recording her segments of the film, having shown Hobkinson what journalistic determination looks like.