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Matter of Survival

When filmmaker Sally Potter was a scrappy street kid in North London, she made a horrific discovery. \"I stumbled across details of the concentration camps on a sheet of greasy paper that some fish and chips had been wrapped in,\" she said. \"I wept and wept in terror and incomprehension.... I kept wanting it not to be true.\"
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May 24, 2001

When filmmaker Sally Potter was a scrappy street kid in North London, she made a horrific discovery. “I stumbled across details of the concentration camps on a sheet of greasy paper that some fish and chips had been wrapped in,” she said. “I wept and wept in terror and incomprehension…. I kept wanting it not to be true.”

Potter, then 7, wondered how people could be so cruel. She asked herself if she could have survived the camps. The questions haunted her for decades. She has explored them in her most recent film, “The Man Who Cried,” which opens today in Los Angeles.

The movie tells of Fegele (Christina Ricci), an orphan who flees a Russian pogrom and goes to live with foster parents in England, who change her name to Suzie. She isn’t permitted to speak Yiddish, but she is allowed to sing; eventually she joins an opera company in Paris, takes a Gypsy lover (Johnny Depp) and braves the Nazis. The film also stars Cate Blanchett as Suzie’s ambitious Russian friend and John Turturro as a vain tenor.

While other Holocaust films focus on the carnage of the Shoah, writer-director Potter’s movie emphasizes survival. “The iconography of the Holocaust is in danger of becoming pornographic,” she explained, meaning that people look at the shocking images voyeuristically, without a deeper understanding. “That can induce tremendous feelings of hopelessness. But the reality is that the Holocaust did not win.”

All of Potter’s films have strong female protagonists. In “Orlando” (1992), a riff on sexual politics, a British nobleman ages 400 years and changes gender midway. In “The Tango Lesson” (1997), Potter stars as a woman (coincidentally named Sally), who masters the dance and her dance teacher. In “The Man Who Cried,” the fictional Fegele loses her Yiddish language but finds her voice, literally, through song. Each heroine is an outsider who survives on her wits — not unlike Potter herself.

The daughter of a poet and a singer, she grew up in a Bohemian, politically radical household in a run-down section of London. “Sometimes there wasn’t food in the house, but there was always a book,” she said during a telephone interview from her home in a converted East End shoe factory. When Potter was 14, she received her first 8mm camera; a year later she dropped out of school to become an artist. Over the years, she pinched pennies and occasionally squatted in houses while working as a dancer, performance artist and experimental filmmaker.

Potter began writing “The Man Who Cried,” a period drama, in the “grief and aftershock” of her father’s unexpected death of a heart attack in 1995. “I found myself contemplating his absence,” she said. “The [motif in the] story became Fegele’s search for her father. His absence haunts her life.”

As research, Potter perused photographs of shtetls, read hundreds of books, and interviewed dozens of Holocaust survivors in Russia, England and Israel. She listened to klezmer music for inspiration while writing the movie. At one point, she said, she became “The Woman Who Cried.”

During a trip to Moscow, Potter trekked to the suburbs and rang a doorbell with a scrap of paper in hand. She had tracked down a friend’s lost Jewish relatives; some time later, she attended the family reunion in London. “We were all in tears,” Potter recalled. “I felt like I had become part of this incredible, historical tapestry.”

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