Talking Blessed is the Match with Director, Roberta Grossman

This week, I am putting the spotlight on Director, Roberta Grossman. Her film, Blessed is the Match: The Life and Death of Hannah Senesh which opened in NY on January 28th, is the first documentary feature about the World War II-era poet and diarist who joined the only military rescue mission to rescue Jews during the Holocaust in her native Hungary.

Hannah parachuted behind enemy lines, was captured the day she got there, was tortured and killed by the Nazis. The documentary is narrated by three time Academy Award nominee, Joan Allen and opens in additional theaters this month and March 2009.

When did you first realize that you had a passion for learning about history and social justice?
When I was very young I started reading obsessively about the Holocaust for reasons that I do not understand. From all of the reading that I did, the thing that came across the most was how people wanted their stories to be told. When they have had their lives cut short in such a painful way, I think that helping to tell those stories keeps them from getting lost.

So what set Hannah Senesh’s story aside from the rest?
She is very compelling in a number of ways. One is that she was of an age and at a place where she was given the opportunity to act. She wasn’t someone who was crushed under the forces. She is compelling because she decided to take that action, no matter how foolish or risky that it was, she acted. She is someone who left behind some of her deepest thoughts in her journals, poems, and letters to her brother and mother. She was also an avid photographer, so all of those things make her a very compelling subject for a movie.

How much time did you spend on making the film and researching?
The film took about 3 years to make. We worked with several scholars from Hungary, Israel, London, and New York. The team helped locate everyone who was alive who knew Hannah, translated the journals and poems that had never been translated before, and organized and cataloged the 1300 photographs Hannah had in her diary. When I had a very rough cut, I went to Israel and we all discussed the visual as well as the content. Then they all received various edits of the films and commented on it so working with the scholars happened from beginning to end.

Did you always know that you wanted to tell the story through Hannah’s mother, Catherine’s eyes?
I first read Hannah’s diary when I was in junior high and I was very taken aback by Hannah. She had kind of a very big influence in my life. When I was right out of college, I became a film maker and tried to write about Hannah. About 3 and a half years ago, things came together and by that time, I was a mother and realized that the way to film the story should be through Catherine’s eyes. Catherine had written a very beautiful memoir about Hannah’s childhood and that was the core of the narrative.

What is the most memorable poem of Hannah’s that you have read?

Blessed is the Match is the poem that she wrote before she crossed the border from Yugoslavia to Hungary, especially since she was captured the very day that she crossed the border. What’s so interesting about this poem is that I think that it is a suicide note talking about her awareness that a match is a very small part of any fire but if she could start a fire or whatever happened to her, that was a sacrifice she thought was worth making.

What are some advantages of creating a documentary vs. a feature film?
I really love the authenticity of documentaries. I love using the real things that people held. There is a scene where the actress is using Hannah’s typewriter, she is wearing Hannah’s watch, and we use the actual letters or duplicates of the actual letters that went back and forth between Hannah, her mother, and her brother. Also getting to work with the scholars and hearing what they have to say. Most importantly, talking to the people who knew Hannah, the most powerful parts of the film.

When traveling to Israel, did you learn anything there that may spark another documentary on another issue that the world needs to know more about?
I am in a period of rumination about what to do next.