A German Jewish filmmaker received a Jewish film award for a comedy about Hitler. Dani Levy accepted the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival’s Freedom of Expression award for “My Fuehrer: The Truly Truest Truth About Adolf Hitler” Tuesday night after its North American premiere in San Francisco. He said he used humor to deflate the myth of Hitler, which is perpetuated by treating the former German dictator as a larger-than-life monster.
The Swiss-born Levy, 49, said he was influenced by Charlie Chaplin’s “The Great Dictator” and Ernst Lubitsch’s “To Be or Not to Be,” two early 1940s films that satirized Hitler for the same purpose.
“My Fuehrer,” which has no North American distributor, garnered tremendous media interest and mixed critical reviews when it was released in Germany in January.
Levy’s previous film, “Go For Zucker,” swept the German film awards in 2005 and was widely acclaimed as the first German Jewish comedy since the 1930s.
