THE OPTIMIST Movie & Why It’s Worth a Watch
It’s hard to read/watch/learn anything about the Holocaust. It makes your gut clutch and your heart break. To be honest I had to brace myself before I started watching THE OPTIMIST, but the stories of two unlikely characters – a teenager and an old man – coming together out of pain kept me captivated. I wanted to hear more. To see how it ended for both of them.
THE OPTIMIST movie tells the true story of Herbert Heller, who spent years keeping his experience as a teenage prisoner in Auschwitz a secret from his family. He meets Abbey, a young girl confronting her own hardships and fears of death. Her strength inspires him to finally open up about the past he kept buried.
Consider these questions: When have you seen shared stories transform individual lives, relationships, and communities? How have they given you hope or provided healing in your own life?
THE OPTIMIST can help with the answers: Films are stories. The Optimist is a story about the power of sharing stories. Herbert has kept his story a secret for far too long. It perpetuates and extends the suffering that was inflicted upon him, his family, and millions of others. Sharing his story releases some of that trauma into the world, and, somewhat ironically, this shared trauma doesn’t further extend that suffering but helps others find their own healing.
The film concludes with an encounter between the real Herbert Heller and a version of Abbey, in which a young woman tells Herbert of the impact that his story had on her life. It’s an example of how shared stories can break the cycles of oppression that plague victims of traumatic events. And now, with The Optimist widely available for audiences around the world, that reach will extend even further.
Directed by Finn Taylor and produced by Jeanine Thomas, THE OPTIMIST stars Stephen Lang and Elsie Fisher in an intimate, intergenerational story about trauma, memory, and healing. Lang delivers a career-defining performance opposite Fisher in a story developed over more than a decade by Thomas, who first met Heller before his passing in 2021.
The film honors Heller’s legacy as an educator and survivor who shared his testimony with thousands of students nationwide. Watch when the film is released nationwide on March 11th. Visit TheOptimistMovie.com to learn more.
This is a sponsored post on behalf of Review Wire Media for Trafalgar Releasing.