Auf Wiedersehen: ‘Til We Meet Again

On 9/11, filmmaker Linda G. Mills's son, Ronnie, who was attending public school in lower Manhattan, witnessed the destruction of the World Trade Center. Five years later (for reasons not entirely clear), Mills decided to link Ronnie's experience with the forced exile of her Jewish mother, Annie, from Vienna in 1939. Traveling with the now 10-year-old Ronnie and the rather opinionated Annie, Mills arrives in Vienna to explore her family's history and the fate of Austria's Jews during the Holocaust. Auf Wiedersehen (co-directed by Brian Dilg) works best when it focuses on historical subject matter, particularly the rarely told story of how the Nazis forced Jewish community leaders into coordinating the imprisonment and deportation of Vienna's Jews. Annie, who initially comes across as bitterly crotchety, slowly blossoms into a warm raconteur when describing her Viennese childhood, and her interactions with contemporary Austrians, especially the people currently occupying her childhood home, are genuinely touching. As a personal history of how the Holocaust reshaped one family's existence, the documentary works fine, although the film suffers when Ronnie is allowed to run amok on camera (which is too often). Still, this should be considered a strong optional purchase. Aud: C, P. (P. Hall)