As many of you know, the American Film Institute has a three screen theater in Silver Spring. It is on the site of the old Silver Spring Theater, which Edie tells me she went to religiously every Shabbat afternoon growing up. It is a great resource for the area, showing a wide variety of films, some of which (yes) you can also see on your home screens, but others that show up nowhere else.

Right now, the AFI is in the middle of a December film festival, sponsored by the European Union and many of the European embassies in Washington. If I remember my numbers correctly, there are 27 countries with entries, and over 50 films, most being shown only two times.

We decided to see some of these new films, and set about to first determine which films we thought we wanted to see, and then to coordinate them with times when we would be available. We wound up with tickets for three films. The first was yesterday, and the others the next two Sundays.

Last evening we saw The Hungarian Dressmaker, which I guess is a Slovakian film, although its crews come from a number of central European countries. It was perhaps the darkest and heaviest film I have ever seen. Which is not to say it was a bad film; it isn’t at all. But – let’s put it this way. The movie was filmed in very bright colors, but in my mind, it was all done in black and white, or perhaps even black and gray.

It is 1942 in the city of Brataslava, the capital of the Slovak Republic, a government allied with Nazi Germany, created out of a part of what had been the Republic of Czechoslovakia in 1939. The Slovak Republic was to last only until 1945, when the war ended and Czechoslovakia recreated. It was a brutal regime.

This area of the world, before World War I, was of course part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and there were many ethnic Hungarians living in this part of the empire, along with Czechs and Slovaks. One of these Hungarians (in the film) was a young woman named Marika, a dressmaker who worked at a Jewish owned tailor shop in Brataslava.

Her husband had been forced into the Slovak Republic’s army and was somewhere fighting the Allies (he was later reported dead). As you might expect, the Jews were rounded up and sent north to Poland, and the shop was closed. Marika had no work and went to live on an impoverished farm that belonged to her husband’s family. She soon found that she was not alone – the young (10 year old? 12 year old?) son of her Jewish former employer was hiding in her barn. What should she do?

Life was awful for everyone. It was particularly terrible for Hungarians living in Slovakia, and there were continual calls to expel them. And of course, it was impossible for Jews, most of whom had already been expelled and worse. Hiding a Jewish child would put Marika at even greater risk and it was the last thing she expected to have to do, or wanted to do. But what choice did she have? (Her neighbors who had a similar choice, decided to turn the Jews in to the authorities.)

It is unclear that she even liked Simon, but she kept him alive, not in her house, but in the barn, where he slept with the pigs and milked the goat, and was sworn to silence (remarkably, he was able to stay quiet) when anyone else was near. And for Simon, of course, things got even worse in the winter.

But this is just part of the story. The central character is not Simon, but Marika, subject to terrible treatment at the hands of the authorities (who confiscate everything she has of value, making her farm work that much more difficult), terrible treatment at the hands of her husbands’ Slovak parents who accuse her of trying to sell their family land, terrible treatment at the hands of a German general, who engages her to make some dresses for his wife but has other thoughts about her usefulness as well, and terrible treatment at the hands of a Slovak army officer, who covets her land and her body.

Yes, this is one heavy movie that is one more thing. It is very, very ambitious in that it attempts, pretty successfully, to show all of the difficulties of life in the middle of World War II in Slovakia for everyone, and how so many different hard to reconcile conflicts arise: Jews against everyone, Slovaks against Hungarian ethnics, anti-Nazi Slovaks against the government of the Slovak Republic, the Slovakian army against their allies the Germans, internal church divisions (Hungarian versus Slovakian mass, for example) and so on.

This is quite a film. So many awful topics brought up. Each worth thinking about. But I doubt you will see this film. It is really off the beaten path.