Director Beth Lane (L) and her mother, Ginger Lane (R), on the set of UnBroken. Courtesy of UnBroken film production
Documentary is happy to debut an exclusive clip from Beth Lane’s debut feature UnBroken, which won a prize for best documentary feature premiere at Heartland International Film Festival in Indianapolis, Indiana. The documentary chronicles the story of the director’s mother and her six siblings as they escape Nazi Germany, and the modern-day reverberations of their separation from their father, Lane’s grandfather Alexander. Greenwich Entertainment is releasing the film in theaters this Friday, February 21, 2025, at the Quad in NYC, Laemmle Town Center in Encino, CA, and more.
On the clip, Lane writes in part, “This clip comes on the heels of a heavy archival and graphic sequence that depicts the social avalanche of the nation falling under the spell of Nazism. It was very important to me that UnBroken not be a history lesson or a repetition of archival images that we have all seen so many times. But we had to incorporate the history specifically as it related to my birth grandfather, Alexander. And although he survived Oranienburg, the first concentration camp established in 1933, his mental and physical health was never the same. So in order to bring the ‘history lesson’ to life, the scene you see here is me, meeting my grandfather for the first time, at the archives at Centrum Judaicum in Berlin. In preparation for my visit, the archives sent me digital copies of what they were going to show me, but I chose not to look at them. I wanted the camera to capture me bearing witness to whatever they had.”