“My Underground Mother” Screens Jan. 20 in New York and Jan. 21–22 in Miami Ahead of Holocaust Remembrance Day
What is inherited — and what is deliberately buried — often shapes a life more powerfully than what is openly acknowledged.
That question sits at the heart of “My Underground Mother,” a new investigative and deeply personal documentary by veteran journalist and editor Marisa Fox, screening Tuesday, January 20 at the New York Jewish Film Festival and Wednesday, January 21 and Thursday, January 22 at the Miami Jewish Film Festival, with additional online streaming available January 23–28, ahead of Holocaust Remembrance Day on Tuesday, January 27.
The film unfolds as both a historical excavation and an intimate reckoning. For more than a decade, Fox pursued the truth behind her late mother’s past — a past her mother fiercely obscured. To her daughter, she was Tamar: a redheaded freedom fighter in British Mandate Palestine, a woman who rejected the label of “Holocaust victim.” What Fox uncovers is far more complicated and far more unsettling.
“My Underground Mother” begins with a fragment: a page from a diary written inside a Nazi-run Jewish women’s forced labor camp. That page, composed by teenage prisoners, opens a door Fox did not know existed. Her mother was not only Tamar. She was also Hela — a Polish-born survivor of a women’s camp in Nazi-occupied Sudetenland, part of a clandestine network of girls who endured sexual violence, coercion and trafficking, and who forged forms of resistance that history has largely refused to name.
Fox’s film traces her journey across continents as she tracks down surviving members of this group — now elderly women, speaking publicly for the first time more than 80 years after World War II. Their testimonies complicate familiar Holocaust narratives, confronting sexual trauma and agency without sensationalism, and insisting on women’s voices as primary historical evidence rather than marginal footnotes.
What distinguishes “My Underground Mother” is its refusal to separate personal memory from political silence. Fox does not position herself as a detached observer. Her search is explicitly emotional, shaped by grief, anger, and unresolved tension — the experience of a daughter trying to understand why her mother chose reinvention over remembrance. The film asks difficult questions about shame, survival, and the postwar forces that encouraged silence, particularly for women whose experiences did not fit heroic or sanctioned narratives.
The documentary marks Fox’s directorial debut, but it carries the assurance of a seasoned journalist. Her background — spanning print, broadcast, and digital reporting for outlets including The New York Times, CNN, The Daily Beast, Ms., Elle, The Forward, and Haaretz — is evident in the film’s rigor and restraint.
The production team includes additional producers Deborah Shaffer and Kelly Sheehan, with executive producers Deborah Oppenheimer, Nancy Spielberg, and Michael Berenbaum. The creative team features cinematographer Slawomir Grunberg, composer Wendy Blackstone, editor Keith Reamer, and animation artist Molly Schwartz.
Importantly, “My Underground Mother” enters a conversation that has too often excluded women’s lived experiences of sexual violence during the Holocaust — not because they were rare, but because they were systematically suppressed. The film creates space for survivors to speak in their own voices, on their own terms.
That the documentary is screening January 20–22, with streaming January 23–28, in the days leading up to Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27, feels deliberate rather than ceremonial. Remembrance, the film suggests, is not static. It evolves as new truths surface — and as families, institutions, and cultures become willing to listen.
“My Underground Mother” does not offer easy closure. What it offers instead is a confrontation with the cost of silence, and a platform for stories long denied historical oxygen to finally be heard.
More information:
No comments:
Post a Comment