MINNESOTA PREMIERE

Filmmaker and journalist Marisa Fox joins TCJFF in person for a remarkable investigation into the mother she thought she knew—and the history her mother spent a lifetime trying to leave behind.

Twenty years after her mother’s death, Fox uncovers a secret that transforms everything she understood about her family. She knew her mother as Tamar, the fiery redheaded freedom fighter of British Mandate Palestine. But before Tamar, there was Hela—a Polish-born Jewish teenager who survived a women’s forced labor camp in the Nazi-occupied Sudetenland.

When Fox discovers traces of her mother’s story in a journal kept by the camp’s teenage prisoners, she sets out to find the women who survived alongside her. Tracking them across continents, she pieces together a history long buried by silence: of exploitation and trauma, but also extraordinary courage, resistance, friendship, and agency—and of the postwar shame that helped drive her mother to reinvent herself.

Blending riveting testimony, striking animation, archival discovery, and intimate vérité footage, My Underground Mother is at once a daughter’s search for the woman hidden inside her own mother and a powerful reclamation of women’s wartime experiences too often left outside the historical record.

The screening will be followed by a conversation with filmmaker and journalist Marisa Fox, whose personal story is at the heart of the film, facilitated by Meira Besikof of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Minnesota and the Dakotas.

Marisa Fox has written for The New York Times, Haaretz, Elle, InStyle, O, New York, Newsday, the Los Angeles Times and many other publications.

This film is presented in partnership with the Jewish Community Relations Council of Minnesota and the Dakotas. Use promo code JCRC for 20% off tickets.