The Last Happy Day - An Essay on the Destructive Power of War

Summary

A portrait of a doctor who saw the worst of society and rn. The Last Happy Day is an experimental documentary portrait of Sandor (Alexander) Lenard, a Hungarian medical doctor and a distant cousin ...

A portrait of a doctor who saw the worst of society and rn. The Last Happy Day is an experimental documentary portrait of Sandor (Alexander) Lenard, a Hungarian medical doctor and a distant cousin of filmmaker Lynne Sachs. In 1938 Lenard, a writer with a Jewish background, fled the Nazis to a safe haven in Rome. Shortly thereafter, the U.S. Army Graves Registration Service hired Lenard to reconstruct the bones -- small and large -- of dead American soldiers.. Eventually he found himself in remotest Brazil where he embarked on the translation of “Winnie the Pooh” into Latin, an eccentric task that catapulted him to brief world-wide fame. Sachs' essay film uses personal letters, abstracted war imagery, home movies, interviews, and a children's performance to create an intimate meditation on the destructive power of war.. “A fascinating, unconventional approach to a Holocaust-related story ... a frequently charming work that makes no effort to disguise an underlying melancholy.” George Robinson, The Jewish Week. “Filmmaker Lynne Sachs has invented a new form of poetic Documentary, melding the visual lyricism of personal avant-garde cinema with the investigative rigor of historical documentary. Her latest film, ‘The Last Happy Day’ is visually breathtaking and skillfully layered as it moves between past and present, between continents and across the generations of her own family. Sachs movingly explores the sorrows of a family member lost in the dislocations of World War 2, and the hope of a new generation discovering the richness of their family's past.” - Jeffrey Skoller, Film and Media Dept., UC Berkeley. Premiere: New York Film Festival, 2009. Broadcast: Hungarian Public Television, Spring 2010.. Selected Screenings and Honors: Indiewire.Com: Nominated One of the Best “Undistributed Films” of 2009; Director’s Choice Award, Black Maria Film Festival 2010.

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