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Reviews
Prisoner of Her Past (2010)
Gripping
For many years, Howard Reich has been the superlative jazz critic and writer for the Chicago Tribune. This documentary reveals his incredible personal history as a second-generation member of a family of Ukranian Jewish Holocaust survivors. The film focuses mainly on his elderly mother, who after years of uneventful life in the Chicago area, resisting Mr. Reich's and his sister's attempts to talk about her experiences, suddenly begins to "act out" her wartime traumas. His mother is diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and Mr. Reich, in efforts to find out what actually happened to his mother, ends up locating long-lost and never-seen relatives both in the US and in Europe, with both positive and disturbing results. At only one hour long, this is an engrossing and fascinating true-life detective story.