This kind of hands-on storytelling is ultimately what makes Shanghai Ghetto move beyond a good, dry, reliable textbook and what allows it to rank with its worthy predecessors.
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02/07/03
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Shanghai Ghetto (2002)
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Reviews Counted:44
Fresh:36
Rotten:8
Average Rating:6.8/10
Consensus: Explores a little-known piece of Holocaust history, weaving together stories of overlapping cultures and their coexistence under the pretext of a war to create a touching and unusual narrative.
Theatrical Release:Sep 27, 2002 Limited
Synopsis: In the late 1930s thousands of German Jews, fearing for their lives under Nazi rule and unable to secure entrance visas to other countries, found refuge in the Japanese-occupied city of Shanghai.... [More]
Starring: Harold Janklowicz, Alfred Kohn, Betty Grebenschikoff, Sigmund Tobias
Director: Dana Janklowicz-Mann, Amir Mann
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Reviews for Shanghai Ghetto
Shanghai Ghetto would make a good primer for high school students ignorant of pre- World War II history, but in the entirety of Holocaust cinema it is a blip on the radar.
09/27/02
Top CriticThe film is delicately narrated by Martin Landau and directed with sensitivity and skill by Dana Janklowicz-Mann.
05/15/03
Throughout the film, the storytelling is eloquent and genuine, but the Manns' unadventurous approach ... rarely hits emotional pay dirt.
09/24/02
Top CriticIt's incredible the number of stories the Holocaust has generated. Just when you think that every possible angle has been exhausted by documentarians, another new film emerges with yet another remarkable yet shockingly little-known perspective.
05/30/03
The power of Shanghai Ghetto, a documentary by Dana Janklowicz-Mann and Amir Mann, rests in the voices of men and women, now in their 70s, who lived there in the 1940s.
01/30/03
Shanghai Ghetto should be applauded for finding a new angle on a tireless story, but you might want to think twice before booking passage.
06/01/03
Shanghai Ghetto, much stranger than any fiction, brings this unknown slice of history affectingly to life.
05/16/03
It's too bad that the picture lacks a clear narrative thread and, ultimately, much of a point besides telling a weird little story in an overly familiar sort of way.
08/20/03
The film is a worthy addition to the vast catalogue of Holocaust cinema but too narrowly focused on the experiences of the refugees, to the exclusion of Chinese and Japanese sources.
05/22/03
Top CriticThis may not have the dramatic gut-wrenching impact of other Holocaust films, but it's a compelling story, mainly because of the way it's told by the people who were there.
03/28/03
A documentary that is stirring and enlightening.
03/27/03
Top CriticThe story itself it mostly told through on-camera interviews with several survivors, whose riveting memories are rendered with such clarity that it's as if it all happened only yesterday.
09/26/02
Like Lisa Gossels' Children of Chabannes (2000), which tells another little-known story about French villagers who saved 400 Jewish children, Shanghai Ghetto is a celebration of humanity.
10/05/02
An absorbing documentary.
05/23/03
Some remarkable achival film about how Shanghai (of all places) served Jews who escaped the Holocaust.
09/24/02
All of this story is engrossing, especially because it unfolds something more than political data.
10/17/02
Top CriticThe film uses standard techniques to tell its tale ... but does so with integrity and attention to detail.
09/26/02
Top CriticFairly artless even by the standards of talking-heads documentaries, Shanghai Ghetto still proves fascinating.
05/23/03
Top CriticThe mix of such fascinating events with the memories of those who endured them is undeniably compelling, even if much of what's described here has been described for decades.
05/23/03
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