The official trailer is here for Israeli filmmaker Maya Sarfaty’s haunting documentary Love It Was Not opening in movie theaters starting Friday, November 5 including at Quad Cinema in New York City, Laemmle Royal in Los Angeles, and Laemmle Town Center 5 in Encino.
Based on Sarfaty’s 2016 Student Academy Award-winning short The Most Beautiful Woman, Love, It Was Not is a tragic love story between a prisoner and a Nazi – as well as the ambivalence between good and evil.
Beautiful and full of life, Helena Citron, is taken to Auschwitz as a teenager (one of the first 1000 transported to the concentration camp), and soon finds unlikely solace under the protection of Franz Wunsch, a barely older SS officer who falls in love with her and her magnetic singing voice. Risking execution if caught, they went on with their forbidden romantic relationship for two and a half years until the war ended and the camp was liberated.
Thirty years later, a letter arrives from Wunsch’s wife asking Helena to “return the favor” — testify on Wunsch’s behalf at his war crimes trial. Faced with an impossible decision, Helena must choose. Will she help the man who brutalized so many lives, but saved hers?
Sarfaty uses archival footage to show the repercussions on the couple’s lives and those of their families. Eyewitness accounts from women who observed this taboo relationship while in Auschwitz add to the incredible story.
Watch the official trailer