Rosalee Glass, a former Holocaust survivor taken prisoner to a Siberian gulag during WWII, transforms her destiny. In her ’80s she begins an acting career, in her ’90s wins a Senior beauty pageant and dares to ride Alaskan Sled dogs at 100.
If the goal of this documentary was to highlight the rather amazing Rosalee Glass, it succeeded but with a few glaring issues. For one, Lillian Glass, the director of the film and daughter of Rosalee, puts herself in the spotlight for the last half of the movie. I understand self-promotion and using what you got, but if this is a mother’s day film, focus on mom. Second, while Rosalee’s story rivals with the best on the market, the low-budget film does not honor her rather tragic life.
Rosalee’s story began in Poland where she was born in 1917. Rosalee married an older man before joining other Jewish prisoners in a Siberian labor camp. Over the course of her life, she married her great love and gave birth to her first child under harsh Holocaust conditions. Her baby died from malnourishment. She moved to Germany to escape the camp and gave birth to two more children one of whom died from Tuberculosis which also threatened to take Rosalee’s husband’s life.
With her husband recovered and their young son, Rosalee moved to America and welcomed their daughter Lillian to the world. Years passed with the family still fighting Tuberculosis, working their own profitable businesses and enjoying life. Then tragedy struck twice taking Rosalee’s son and later on, after retirement, her husband. In her eighties with only her one child remaining, depression struck hard taking away the elderly lady’s desire to live until she woke up one day ready to live her life to the fullest.
Most of the film focuses on the last twenty years of Rosalee’s life (she is still alive today) where she fills her days doing everything she could not in the past. She rode a bobsled, traveled the world, all while practicing Pilates to retain her youthful vigor. Her daughter Lillian aided her travels as a faithful and supportive companion.
Lillian Glass is a semi-famous filmmaker and best-selling author about body language and other self-help novels. Although based on the film she produced for her mom, no one in her life was toxic. I would have to assume her novels come from personal romantic relationships as she placed her parents on hero status. Either way, she took the film as an opportunity to highlight her own achievements and credit her success to her vivacious mother.
The sadness of Rosalee’s story coupled with the lack of grandchildren and only one of four children still alive makes the story even more tragic. I am truly impressed by Rosalee’s ability to get out of bed every day, not to mention her youthfulness so late in life, although the film tends to over-share and not just on Lillian’s successes. Why we needed to see Rosalee’s trip to the doctors, or her clothing choices for the bobsled or her using Joseph Stalin’s personal toilet are beyond me.
If the film had been broken into two movies instead of one, they could have produced the desired effect. The first film archiving Rosalee’s life during the Holocaust and a second her life after the Holocaust. Come to think of it, the movie could have been a trilogy as the three sections vary so greatly. The retelling of her youth and the harrowing losses in the war would have been more inspiring with how she picked up the pieces of her life and found a way not only back to her husband but to a comfortable life in another country as a survivor.
Overall, the first part of the film was hard to watch but in the right way, as a testament to the life of a strong woman with a story worth sharing. The second half takes away from the first, displacing the plot with the veiled attempt to self-advertise while Lillian claims to show tribute to her remarkable mother. The stock footage too could have done with better narration. Some narrated areas made no sense at all when paired with cinema footage instead of images of the main character, Rosalee. Either way, the movie lost its purpose and left without a bang.
Available on DVD, Digital and VOD May 7th
