A movie to keep their stories alive

Boston-area subjects speak of unspeakable

Holocaust survivor Israel Arbeiter is interviewed in ''The Holocaust: Memory and Legacy.'' (Marc theriault)

Susie Davidson of Brookline is a geriatric care manager, journalist, poet, self-described "grass-roots organizer" - and most recently, a filmmaker. She's just completed her first film, "The Holocaust: Memory and Legacy," a documentary about Boston Holocaust survivors which will be screened at the Coolidge Corner Theatre Dec. 22.

The film is based on her 2005 book "I Refused to Die," a compendium of stories of Boston-area Holocaust survivors and soldiers who liberated the concentration camps. Though Davidson is Jewish, her passionate interest in the Holocaust is unusual given that she has no family connection to it - "just a lot of empathy," she says - and that she'd never even met a Holocaust survivor until 2002, when she wrote an article about the New England Holocaust Memorial for the Jewish Advocate.

"I decided that with Holocaust denial on the increase and global genocide on the rise, I would try to tell their stories," said Davidson, 53. "We've seen from the film 'Paper Clips' [a documentary about students in Tennessee who created a memorial to Holocaust victims] how broad an impact a film can have."

Davidson's film, coproduced with local filmmakers Marc Theriault and Joshua Fleetwood, includes interviews with Israel Arbeiter, who helped establish Boston's Holocaust memorial; artist Samuel Bak, whose paintings deal with his Holocaust experience; and educator Sonia Weitz.

"This is really rough stuff. It can really unravel you and affect you on a very deep level," says Davidson, who says she encouraged some survivors to tell their stories for the first time. "I convinced them that we can't let their stories go with them. Many tears were shed, on both sides."

Bak spoke of being saved at one point by his father, who made fake rubles out of copper and used them to pay off Nazi officers. Rosian Zerner was saved when her parents dug a hole beneath a barbed-wire fence at the Kovno Ghetto and pushed her to safety by telling her to run into the woods.

The film will be screened at the Coolidge Corner Theater on Dec. 22 at 7 p.m. and 8:15 p.m. www.coolidge.org

IT WAS CONTROVERSIAL THEN: and promises to be controversial now. "In the Realm of the Senses" is part of the Harvard Film Archive's 25-film retrospective of the works of Nagisa Oshima, one of the most important Japanese directors of the postwar period. "It's notorious because it is pornographic, with pretty explicit sex scenes," says Haden Guest, the HFA's director. "But it's also a work of astonishing beauty." The film was made in 1976, during a particularly prolific and iconoclastic period for Oshima, known for political works lashing out at the patriarchal military authority in Japan. The film will be introduced by Abé Mark Nornes, a visiting scholar of Japanese cinema. Dec. 19, 7 p.m. www.hcl. harvard.edu/hfa

SCREENINGS OF NOTE: New French cinema is the focus at the MFA this week, including "Angel" by Francois Ozon, based on a book by the cult English writer Elizabeth Taylor who just happens to have penned my favorite novel in the world, "Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont." More relevantly, my colleague Ty Burr described "Angel" as a "delicious lark" and "an airy but ruthless satire of Edwardian romantic novels." Dec. 19 at 8 p.m. and Dec. 20 at noon. www.mfa.org/film

"It's a Wonderful Life" plays the Brattle Theatre, 11 a.m. Dec. 20. www.brattlefilm.org

Linda Matchan can be reached at l_matchan@globe.com.