Documentary screens at Phillips Center

The Documentary Institute presented its latest film, “Angel of Ahlem”, Oct. 17 at the UF Phillips Center for the Performing Arts.

Featured in a recent Susan Stamberg series on NPR, the 90-minute documentary follows Vernon Tott, a dying World War II veteran, as he races against time to find Holocaust survivors he photographed 60 years earlier at a labor camp outside Hanover, Germany.

Four Ahlem survivors attended the screening, along with State University System Chancellor Mark Rosenberg; Admiral LeRoy Collins Jr., executive director of the Florida Department of Veterans’ Affairs; and Kate Nolan, a World War II nurse whose story was also featured in the NPR series, and her son, Major Steve Nolan, a Gainesville resident who just returned from Afghanistan.

“Whenever Vernon found someone, we all cheered and whenever he went to the doctor about his health, we held our breaths,” said Co-Director Churchill Roberts, who worked on “Angel of Ahlem” for more than three years with his longtime institute partners Sandra Dickson, Cindy Hill and Cara Pilson.

“Angel of Ahlem,” which screened this summer at the Lincoln Center in New York City, presents a new twist on the Holocaust, which has been covered extensively in films, Roberts said. Using a present-day setting to revisit the past and telling the story through the eyes of a liberator intrigued the institute.

Academy Award winner Todd Boekelheide composed the music. The institute has produced several other documentaries that ran on PBS, including, most recently, “Negroes With Guns: Rob Williams and Black Power.”

The institute is part of UF’s College of Journalism and Communications, a national leader in the professional education of future journalists and other communications practitioners. Besides documentary, its other graduate-level programs include science/health communication, media law, political communication and international communication.

Posted: October 18, 2007
Category: College News