JIFF At The Movies

Could you be friends with Adolf?

The duo speculated about what it would be like to meet him, adopting the point of view of someone – like Prudovsky’s grandmother – who had survived the Holocaust.

My Neighbour Adolf is a comic drama set in Colombia in 1960, just after Israel’s abduction of Adolf Eichmann in Argentina. Polsky, a lonely and grumpy Holocaust survivor, moves far away from Europe to live in the remote South American countryside.

He calls himself Herzog and he spends his days playing chess and tending his beloved rose bushes. One day, when a mysterious old German man moves in next door, he suspects that his new neighbour is … Adolf Hitler.

Since nobody believes him, he embarks on a detective mission to find the evidence.

When he hears Eichmann has also been living in Argentina he is sure Hitler faked his death in 1945 to also escape to South America. But, to gather evidence and persuade the Mossad that they should capture him, he will need to get closer to his neighbour.

The idea for the film first came to director Leon Prudovsky after he visited Brazil. When he returned home, his long-time friend and the co-writer, Dmitry Malinsky, suggested they write a screenplay inspired by the 1978 thriller The Boys From Brazil, which is focused on Nazi war criminal Josef Mengele hiding out in South America.

But this time, it’s Hitler who has survived the war. The duo speculated about what it would be like to meet him, adopting the point of view of someone – like Prudovsky’s grandmother – who had survived the Holocaust. Imagine if while she was still suffering from the trauma of that, she came across a German man who might be Hitler. How would she feel if she was able to see him after the Holocaust as a living person?

My Neighbour Adolf is now screening nationally in cinemas, including Classic Cinemas, Lido Cinemas and Cameo Cinemas.

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