Italian actor-turned-director Andrea Di Stefano, whose sleek cop thriller “Last Night of Amore” just had its U.S. premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival, is in advanced stages of development on “Karski” a feature about Jan Karski, the World War II Polish resistance fighter who risked his life to blow the whistle on the Holocaust.
Di Stefano’s high-profile project, which is titled “Karski,” is being developed by New York City-based production company Phiphen Pictures, the indie founded by Molly Conners most recently behind Netflix’s “Like Father” and “It’s Bruno!,” the director said. Italy’s expanding Indiana Production, which shepherded “Amore,” is also on board.
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Karski in 1942, defying great danger, twice infiltrated Warsaw’s Jewish Ghetto to witness its horrors and managed to give first-hand accounts of the Holocaust from the Warsaw Ghetto to the Allies, including U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1943. But his alarm cries fell on deaf ears.
After the war, Karski became a professor at Georgetown University. Until he gave testimony for French filmmaker Claude Lanzmann’s seminal Holocaust documentary “Shoah” in 1978, he had rarely spoken — even to colleagues at Georgetown — about what he had done.
“He was a history professor at Georgetown in 1986 when Lanzmann’s doc played on PBS in the U.S.,” Di Stefano said. “The next morning he goes to Georgetown, that’s when the movie starts,” he added. Di Stefano described his “Karski” film as having an atmosphere somewhat similar to “Dead Poet’s Society.”
“This professor, after the part with his interview airs on PBS, finds his students waiting for him at the auditorium. They had no idea that he was a World War II hero,” Di Stefano went on. Then in the screenplay, written by Di Stefano, Karski talks to his students and tells them the story of how at 20 he joined the Polish underground after the Nazi invasion of Poland.
Di Stefano said…
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