UF documentary screens at Phillips Center

October 11, 2007

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — The University of Florida Documentary Institute will screen “Angel of Ahlem” at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday at the Phillips Center for the Performing Arts.

Featured in a recent Susan Stamberg series on National Public Radio, the 90-minute documentary follows Vernon Tott, a dying World War II veteran, as he races against time to find Holocaust survivors he photographed 60 years earlier at a labor camp outside Hanover, Germany.

Four Ahlem survivors plan to attend the screening, along with State University System Chancellor Mark Rosenberg; Admiral LeRoy Collins Jr., executive director of the Florida Department of Veterans’ Affairs; and Kate Nolan, a World War II nurse whose story was also featured in the NPR series, and her son, Maj. Steve Nolan, a Gainesville resident who just returned from Afghanistan.

“Whenever Vernon found someone, we all cheered, and whenever he went to the doctor about his health, we held our breaths,” said Co-Director Churchill Roberts, who worked on “Angel of Ahlem” for more than three years with his longtime institute partners Sandra Dickson, Cindy Hill and Cara Pilson.

“Angel of Ahlem,” which screened this summer at Lincoln Center in New York City, presents a new twist on the Holocaust, which has been covered extensively in films, Roberts said. Using a present-day setting to revisit the past and telling the story through the eyes of a liberator intrigued the institute.

Academy Award winner Todd Boekelheide composed the music. The institute has produced several other documentaries that have been shown on Public Broadcasting Service, including, most recently, “Negroes With Guns: Rob Williams and Black Power.”