By Donald H. Harrison
SAN DIEGO – The Samuel Project, filmed in San Diego and screened at the San Diego International Film Festival, is a gentle post-Holocaust story starring Hal Linden as Samuel, a Holocaust survivor who is reluctant to talk about what the Nazis did to him and his family. Despite prodding by his grandson Eli (Ryan Ochoa) who wants to make an animated film as a class project, Samuel declares “I’m done remembering, but I do remember I don’t want to remember.”
However, Eli is persistent, intuiting that beneath Samuel’s voluble protests (“You’re a rock in the shoe, pain in the ass!”), he eventually will assent. The teenager offers his grandfather a deal he can’t refuse. He will work at the drycleaning establishment for free before and after school, if grandpa will relent and relate his experiences during the Holocaust.
Eli is being raised by a single father (Michael Silver), who is so busy trying to scratch out a living as a real estate agent that he seems to have no time for a relationship with his son. As a result of their continuous interactions, the grandfather becomes an important influence on Eli, who dreams of going to art school. In a side plot, Eli is paired in the class project with Kasim (Mateo Arias), a silent, brooding musician whose lack of social graces make him an outsider. As with his grandfather, Eli must overcome Kasim’s reticence to become involved.
Another important character in the story is Vartan (Ken Pavitian), a local Armenian butcher with whom Samuel conducts a running chess game. They are the kind of friends who enjoy mock-insulting each other. At one point, Vartan chides Samuel, “Don’t feel so special. Jews had a Holocaust, Armenians had a genocide.”
After Eli finally persuades Samuel to talk to him about his life, there is suspense over whether Eli and Kasim, despite their differences, can put together an animated documentary good enough to win scholarships.
As pleasurable as it is to see Hal Linden, who from 1975-82 was known to nearly every television watcher in America as the star of Barney Miller, in which he played the good-natured supervisor of a squad of eccentric detectives, San Diegans also will delight in seeing such familiar venues as Balboa Park, the skyline from San Diego Bay, La Jolla, the Chuck Jones Gallery, and the campus of the San Diego Jewish Academy.
Compliments on this heart-warming film go to writers Marc Fusco, Chris Neighbors, and Steve Weinberger, as well as to animator Donald Wallace. The film will be shown at the AMC Theatre in Mission Valley beginning on Oct. 19.
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Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World. He maybe contacted via donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com