Tag Archives: Holocaust

The Heartland International Film Festival 2025 Season Finale

October 20, 2025 By in Conventions & Events, Indiana, Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
balcony view of a movie screen down below. Onscreen is a pic of Emily Deschanel and two producers, encouraging viewers to become a Heartland member. Walls around screen are glowing green and have large icons of film reels.

Our Sunday night view from the balcony of the Tobias Theater at Newfields. The slideshow still is from last year’s world premiere of ReEntry.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

It’s that time again! Since 1992 my hometown of Indianapolis has presented the Heartland International Film Festival, a multi-day, multi-theater celebration of cinema held every October. Local moviegoers have the opportunity to see over a hundred new works in the realms of documentaries, narrative features, shorts, and animation made across multiple continents from myriad points of the human experience. Some participants stop in Indy on their grand tour of Hollywood’s festival circuit; some are local productions on shoestring budgets; and a wide spectrum of claims are staked in the innumerable niches between, projects with well-known actors screening alongside indies with enormous hearts.

This’ll be my third year diving in and seeing more than just a single entrant. Heartland’s 34th edition runs October 9-19, for which I’ve made plans to catch at least six films in all (Lord willing) — maybe more if time permits…

Once again I took a week’s vacation from my day job and posted for eight consecutive days about the six films I saw at three theaters in nine days, one virtual screening we’ll get to in a moment, plus a few other entries that included still another movie, albeit more of an anti-Heartland studio product that opened the same weekend. I doubt anyone out there read every single word, but I’m not even done yet!

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Heartland Film Festival 2025: “Nuremberg”

October 20, 2025 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Russell Crowe faces off against Rami Malek while Leo Woodall stands in the background.

Zeus vs. Freddie Mercury! TWO GODS ENTER! ONE GOD LEAVES!

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

It’s that time again! Since 1992 my hometown of Indianapolis has presented the Heartland International Film Festival, a multi-day, multi-theater celebration of cinema held every October. Local moviegoers have the opportunity to see over a hundred new works in the realms of documentaries, narrative features, shorts, and animation made across multiple continents from myriad points of the human experience. Some participants stop in Indy on their grand tour of Hollywood’s festival circuit; some are local productions on shoestring budgets; and a wide spectrum of claims are staked in the innumerable niches between, projects with well-known actors screening alongside indies with enormous hearts.

This’ll be my third year diving in and seeing more than just a single entrant. Heartland’s 34th edition runs October 9-19, for which I’ve made plans to catch at least six films in all (Lord willing) — maybe more if time permits…

Our final theatrical screening of the festival, and their official Closing Night selection, was also the very first entrant I bought tickets for, based on a single selling point: Academy Award Winner Russell Crowe IS Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring IN Nuremberg! And that must be announced or imagined in the deepest possible Epic Voice Guy voice or else why bother.

Same as with the Academy Awards, World War II and the Holocaust are common subjects in Heartland selections, for reasons tragically obvious to anyone who’s seen enough of them and nevertheless supports the important, evergreen “Never Forget” message behind them. Nuremberg wasn’t the only such film on the docket, but it was certainly the highest-profile one. Its writer/director James Vanderbilt has worked on numerous big-budget crowd-pleasers (the last three Screams and both Amazing Spider-Mans, among others) and recruited a strong ensemble to tell this particular story, of which the indisputable highlight is — for those just joining us — Maximus himself as Göring, the bombastic narcissist and highest-ranking Nazi still alive after the war, the sort of boo-able real-life Kingpin in more ways than one, whose every move and every haughty gaze was like a steamroller through every room he entered.

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“A Real Pain”: Roman Roy’s European Vacation

November 24, 2024 By in Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment
Two thirtysomething Jewish men staring at offscreen WWII remembrance statues in solemnity.

Every pro review site that’s written about the film has used this same pic, so here’s me trying to be mistaken for one of them.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: this year’s Heartland Film Festival was a cinematic cornucopia that overwhelmed me with FOMO and forced some hard choices. I was largely pleased with the eight films I caught, but quite a few big ones got away. Among the most high-profile entries I missed was their opening-night feature A Real Pain, a buddy-trip dramedy from writer/director Jesse Eisenberg (yep, the ex-Lex Luthor, the Now You See Me guy, the Zombieland rules-lister, The Social Network‘s Mark Zuckerberg, and so on and on) about family tensions, unpredictable grief, awkward group tours, and letting Kieran Culkin run amuck as an unbridled man-child who’s fascinating to watch onscreen at a remove but whom, if you were stuck next to him in real life, might have you searching desperately for an exit or at least a different seat to escape his orbit.

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Heartland International Film Festival 2023 Screening #6: “Avenue of the Giants”

October 15, 2023 By in Conventions & Events, Movies/Films/Flicks Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
A short-haired Elsie Fisher and a slightly hunched, shabbily dressed Stephen Lang converse in the woods.

With no official site and no trailer online, this is the only image available for this film on any entertainment hub that’s covered its film-festival tour.

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

Since 1992 Indianapolis has held its own celebration of cinema with the Heartland International Film Festival, a multi-day, multi-theater marathon every October of documentaries, shorts, narrative features, and animated works made across multiple continents from myriad points of the human experience, usually with an emphasis on uplift and positivity. Ever since the “International” modifier was added in recent years, their acquisition team steadily escalated their game as they’ve recruited higher-profile projects into their lineups. For years my wife Anne and I have talked about getting into the spirit of the festivities. This year we will do better. The festival’s 32nd edition will run October 5-15. I’ve committed to at least five different Heartland showings — one of them virtual in-home, while the others will screen at four different theaters throughout central Indiana…

We’ve now gone beyond “at least five” into festival overtime. Due to unfortunate circumstances beyond our control at our fifth feature presentation, we wound up with a free pass for one more film. I’d already driven 150 miles this week around central Indiana for cinema’s sake — in the midst of a normal 40-hour work week, mind you — and was burned out on driving, but Heartland also had dozens of new films available for virtual rental at home (our first film was among those). After digging through the entire list, I found a drama in Anne’s historical-aficionado wheelhouse of World War II in general and the European theater in particular.

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An Afternoon with the Woman Who Forgave Josef Mengele

October 12, 2015 By in Indiana, Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , 4 Comments

Eva Mozes Kor.

This past Saturday afternoon my wife Anne and I paid a visit to the CANDLES Holocaust Museum and Education Center in Terre Haute, located a mere hour west of Indianapolis and a mile down the road from Indiana State University. The Museum’s Founding Director, pictured above, is Eva Mozes Kor. You might have seen her in such films as the 2006 documentary Forgiving Dr. Mengele or in the occasional special about the Holocaust. Eva survived the horrors of Auschwitz as a preteen and, today at age 81, lives to share the tale of her extraordinary life with new generations.

We knew the museum told her story and exemplified the principles that helped her transition from victim to survivor over the decades. We didn’t expect her to actually be there in person.

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