SPIELBERG CALLS HOME FOR POIGNANT PREMIERE
>From Tony Halpin in Kiev

The Times, UK
Oct 19 2006

HIS films have brought home the horror of the Holocaust to millions.

Yesterday Steven Spielberg came home to Ukraine to launch a film
about survivors of the Holocaust in his ancestral homeland.

The Hollywood director’s grandparents all came to the United States
from Ukraine, but Spielberg had not visited the country before last
night’s premiere of the documentary Spell Your Name, by the Ukrainian
director Sergei Bukovsky.

Spielberg told The Times that he feared that the "epidemic" of racism
would lead the world into a new era to match the mass slaughters of
the 20th century.

"Hatred comes from fear and we have experienced a century of fear and
I fear that we are going into another century of heightened fear,"
he said.

"Until we get to the bottom of what makes people so afraid of
the differences in others, and what we look like, we are going to
experience an even greater century of fear."

Spielberg’s arrival in Ukraine came a month after commemorations
marking the 65th anniversary of the Babi Yar massacre in Kiev, when
the Nazis murdered 33,771 Jews in two days. He said he had visited
Babi Yar earlier in the day and placed stones at the memorials to
those killed – a traditional Jewish act of remembrance. It and other
massacres had happened, he said, because people had allowed them to.

Tolerance was born of education through films such as Spell Your Name.

"It happened in the 20th century with the Armenians, it happened in
Rwanda, it happened in Sarajevo," he said. "What is inconceivable
to me is that as I look around at what technology has given us to
shrink the world and make us better neighbours and friends, we often
are not better neighbours and friends."

The 90-minute documentary records testimonies of Jews who survived the
Nazi occupation of Ukraine. The $1 million project was funded by Victor
Pinchuk, a billionaire Ukrainian industrialist whose grand-father
left Kiev with his family shortly before the Nazis invaded.

"My parents told me that they knew friends and neighbours who found
themselves at Babi Yar," Mr Pinchuk said.

He had been inspired by Spielberg’s film Schindler’s List to approach
the director with the idea for the documentary.

Spielberg, 59, whose Shoah Foundation co-produced the film, said he
was happy that it had given him an opportunity to visit Ukraine.

"I grew up in a home where my grandparents spoke Russian and Yiddish.

I kind of felt that I had a piece of Ukraine in my own home, especially
around dinner time," he said.

A CELLULOID LIFE

Steven Spielberg, born December 18, 1946, has won three Oscars and
is the most commercially successful film director

Wrote and directed his first large-scale movie at 16 while attending
Arcadia High School in Phoenix, Arizona

Applied unsuccessfully three times to the University of Southern
California’s School of Cinematic Arts

Attended California State University, Long Beach, majoring in English,
but dropped out in 1969 to take a television directing contract at
Universal Studios

Finished his degree by correspondence in 2002, 35 years after starting

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress