Chutzpah! Festival: The Rescue A Live Film-Concerto

Tickets

Cost: $29.50
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Western Canada premiere

Co-presented with the Canadian Museum for Human Rights

The Rescue – A Live Film-Concerto is a performative film experience that combines a 70-min documentary film with a live musical performance by Boris and Alvaro Castellanos (who play piano and bass respectively) joined by local guest musicians. The production recounts the little-known story of ‘Righteous’ Colonel José Arturo Castellanos who collaborated with a Jewish friend to save thousands of Jewish lives during the Holocaust by issuing Salvadoran nationality certificates while working as a diplomat – putting his life and family at great risk. Sadly Castellanos died in 1977 in obscurity in his home country of El Salvador.

This ground-breaking Live Film-Concerto by filmmakers Alvaro and Boris Castellanos, grandsons of Colonel Castellanos, was created as an emotionally engaging and uplifting way to tell the story of their grandfather and in commemoration of all those ‘Righteous Among the Nations.’
The work has been performed in Argentina, Chile, Panama, Costa Rica, Canada, China and Germany, including the former seat of the Nazi Reich Bank and at the Topographie des Terrors Museum – the former Nazi SS and Gestapo headquarters in Berlin.

Thanks to overwhelming evidence and efforts by the Salvadoran government and the Salvadoran Jewish community, José Arturo Castellanos is now recognized as Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem, the world centre for Holocaust research in Jerusalem.
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