Misha and the Wolves (2021)

March 30, 2022 3:35 PM

Misha and the Wolves is a documentary about a woman whose best selling memoir about surviving the Holocaust by being adopted by wolves was revealed to be a hoax by the publisher of that memoir. Previously on the blue.

This movie not only discusses the Holocaust and features survivors talking in detail about their experiences, it includes documentary footage of the concentration camps and torture.

Currently streaming on Netflix.

posted by miss-lapin (1 comment total)

I just watched this, and I was honestly surprised by how highly it was rated on Rotten Tomatoes with a 77% audience rating. There was a lot of fascinating material here, but it felt the movie rode more on the same sensationalism that buoyed the memoir itself and was extremely skimpy on actual reflection of the impact of such a deception and the collaborative mythomania that needed to happen for the book to succeed. Near the end, a Holocaust scholar who was asked to evaluate the novel before publishing flatly states that this isn't a redemption story and I found that the most interesting point. Do we continue to want to paint as one so we can avoid the darker truths of why we believed this story? To let her off the hook so we can do the same for ourselves? I wish this had been explored more.

But instead the film spends a lot of time footage of a set being deconstructed. The metaphor, I found, was obvious and took away time that could have been spent delving into why did we so want to believe this story. Or at least it should haven't been wielded with such a heavy hand.

Also I was really thrown off by the inclusion of documentary footage of torture techniques. I expected footage of things like the camps and so forth, but the torture footage-I had to pause and walk outside to catch my breath on that one. Maybe I'm just having a sensitive day though.
posted by miss-lapin at 3:50 PM on March 30, 2022