Documentary Wins Tropfest’s People Choice Award

February 15, 2017 by Roz Tarszisz
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In the past 13 months Sydney Jewish Museum guide Olga Horak has spoken on a podium with the Governor of NSW, had her portrait hung in the National Portrait Gallery and now has been immortalised on film.

Olga Horak

Canberra filmmaker Cecilia Rumore has made Horak the subject of a short documentary – Another Olga – which has won this year’s People Choice Award at the recent Sydney Tropfest according to a report in The Age.

Rumore met Horak after reading her book, Auschwitz to Australia and was interested in Horak’s positive outlook.

Cecilia Rumore with her award

This year Tropfest entrants were required to work a pineapple into their films and Rumore had to be creative to find a way to bring that into a film about a Holocaust survivor. At the beginning of her film she compares her subject to a pineapple, hard on the outside but with a soft interior.

Horak , who has spoken many times on behalf of the Australian Holocaust survivors, said in her Anniversary of the Liberation of Auschwitz speech in 2016 that those who survived had a high will to live under the terrible conditions in the camps and recalled washing herself in snow and inmates fantasising about food in an attempt to fill the vacuum in their stomachs.

“I don’t live in the past, but the past lives in me. Today, I endeavour to tell the truth so that people of different cultures can live together in harmony” said Horak.

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