Film reminds young, world not to forget

When Jim Goldner was in kindergarten, he asked his teacher if he could put on the play "Little Red Writing Hood." He's come a long way.

Goldner, who is now a cinema professor at SF State, has made a documentary that will premiere in San Francisco this Sunday at the Roxie Cinema.

It took Goldner 12 years to make the film "When I was Fourteen, a Survivor Remembers," the story of Gloria Lyon, a holocaust survivor who is shown speaking about her experience to students at schools from the junior high through college level in the Bay Area.

"I wanted to make a film that showed the important impact that an eyewitness can make to these kinds of events on young people," Goldner said. "Actually, encouraging them to make a positive commitment against forces of bigotry, prejudice, basically hatred."

Goldner first wrote the proposal for the film 12 years ago after he heard an audio tape of one of Lyon's speeches.

"I listened to it and was overwhelmed, not just with her presentation, but the fragments of conversation she had afterwards with students, and to me that was the most compelling because the story itself is very dramatic," Goldner said. "It is how she touches these young people."

The film first premiered before 3,000 people at the National Biennial Conference of the German Protestant Churches in Germany last June as one of the highlights of the conference and received very good reviews, according to Goldner.

The film was picked up by the University of California media distribution, one of the largest media distributors of films, videotape and educational media for use in schools.

At one point the making of the documentary came to a standstill when the project ran out of the money it had received from small contributors throughout the years.

Some of the footage from the film was shot in Germany in the spring of '87, but Goldner was unable to be there because he had suffered a stroke, so the cameraman became the director for three weeks.

A Christian German industrialist put up the rest of the money to finish the film because, according to Goldner, he believed that a whole generation of young people were starting to face the reality of their guilt -- that Germany was responsible for the war and there was no way of making excuses any more.

"He felt that our film presented a compelling look at the life of one individual who, for no fault of her own, became a victim of these forces that Germany forgot to recognize," Goldner said.

Goldner also strongly believes in using the holocaust as an example in his work because, "it is an example of what human beings were capable of doing to themselves ... being a civilized, humane, human being requires some work," he said

Goldner was born in Hollywood and gained an interest in film at a very young age. At the age of nine he made his first film and continued acting, directing and writing throughout junior high and high school.

According to Goldner, he produced the first student-made motion picture while he was in high school. He sent in a script for the Lone Ranger show at 16, and even though they didn't use it, he received a summer internship where he was able to contribute to every aspect of putting the show together.

When Goldner was a graduate student at University of California at Los Angeles, he helped undergraduate student Francis Ford Coppola with two of his films.

In 1963, after making educational films and working at Stanford University's film unit, Goldner joined the SF State faculty as a full-time filmmaking teacher.

"At that time, the SF State film department and Associated Students were the center of the new creative energy that was generated in San Francisco," Goldner said.

He currently teaches courses such as film production, documentary film and film directing in the cinema department.

"He's a wonderful professor. I learned so much from him, and he has so much to offer in terms of all the different aspects in film," said Steven Johnson, a cinema student who had one of Goldner's classes last fall.

Goldner's film premieres this Sunday at the Roxie Cinema at noon, and will also be shown at SF State next month.

[ Golden Gater Online November 2, 1995 ]

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