To mark Holocaust Remembrance Day, KCET and other PBS stations will broadcast Steven Spielberg’s "Schindler’s List" at 8 p.m. April 19 and 21.
The 8 p.m. screening April 21 will be followed at 11:30 p.m. by the 90-minute documentary "Schindler."
On April 20, the actual date of the Yom HaShoah observance, KCET will join Yahoo to host an on-line Web chat with Holocaust survivors. Also participating will be Doug Greenberg, president and CEO of the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, which has videotaped the testimonies of more than 50,000 survivors worldwide.
The Web chat will be carried on www.yahoo.com and www.pbs.com at noon.
Spielberg won two of seven Academy Awards for "Schindler’s List" as best director and for best picture. He will speak about the work of the Shoah Foundation during two intermissions in the film, which is more than three hours long. He will also dedicate the KCET telecast to the memory of Leopold Page, who died March 9 in Los Angeles.
The untiring persistence of Page, who was No. 173 on Schindler’s original list, is credited with persuading first author Thomas Keneally to write the book "Schindler’s List" and then Spielberg to make the movie.
Ben Kingsley, who played Schindler’s Jewish accountant Itzhak Stern in the movie, commented on the continuing intense interest in the 1993 film and others on Holocaust themes in a phone call from his home in England.
"The Holocaust was utterly incomprehensible and can never be explained or understood," Kingsley said. "In spite, or because of that, we must keep questioning the inexplicable, we must insist on telling the story again and again."
Also honoring Yom Hashoah is the Sundance Channel, which will present the following four films on Holocaust themes, two shorts and two features, during the evening of April 18:
"Night and Fog," directed by Alain Resnais, at 8 p.m.
"Raw Images from the Optic Cross" by Karl Nussbaum at 8:30 p.m.
"Europa, Europa" by Agnieszka Holland at 9 p.m.
"Angry Harvest," also directed by Holland, at 11 p.m.
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