Mayday: History From Below

A new installment in his Unimagined Lives project, Skoller's Occupation Diary is his second effort to give voice and memory to those otherwise unremarkable citizens whose historical experiences give personal dimension to our understanding of major events. This 40-min. premiere is an intimate portrait of 92-year-old Alex Matthews, who uses excerpts and photos from his diaries to remember his life as a communist guerrilla in the mountains of Greece, fighting back the Nazis...and the liberation groups' subsequent dilemma with the post-War return of the Monarch. PLUS: Skoller's initial iteration, a riveting tale of scouting the atomic ruins of Japan mere days after the explosions, told by Jeff's neighbor Joe Fischer, with the aid of humble Brownie snapshots he took 80 years ago.AND: A third program component—Zelim Zilnik's Uprising in Jazak, an 18-min. re-counting of the WWII struggles of a former Yugoslav village that supported—and joined-- Tito's partisans, despite the persecutions, arrests, and torture they endured. $13