KEY POINTS:
I HAVE NEVER FORGOTTEN YOU
Director: Richard Trank
Running time: 105 mins
Rating: M (some content may disturb)
Screening: Academy
Herald Rating: * * *
Verdict: A remarkable if reverential and occasionally cloying portrait of Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal
Towards the end of this remarkable portrait of the legendary Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal, the subject weeps as he addresses well-wishers at his 90th birthday celebrations (held, with defiant pointedness, at the Vienna hotel where Hitler kept a suite).
He implores those present - and, by extension, posterity - not to turn him into a hero; he is simply a survivor and, as the title implies, his life's work was an attempt to pay for the privilege of survival. To have done otherwise would be to have forgotten those who didn't make it.
It's a moot point whether the film, a venture of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Los Angeles, has obeyed him.
The lush cloying score is faintly nauseating and Trank has a bludgeoning visual style - the frequent cutaways to concentration camp scenes tend to devalue the currency.
The pity of it is that the subject renders such manipulations unnecessary: genial, even jovial, self-deprecating and deeply intelligent, he belies the image of the implacable avenging angel that was built up by the often-hostile press coverage during his life.
He also emerges as a man of expansive humanity - he speaks of concerns for the Nazis' non-Jewish victims and for the slaughtered in Cambodia and Rwanda.
Much more than a hagiography, the film nevertheless cannot escape the charge of being excessively reverential. But it is nonetheless a compelling portrait of a man's important legacy to history.
