Porcelain Unicorn: The Healing Power of the Human Spirit

Porcelain Unicorn is a sensitively inspiring short film directed by Keegan Wilcox, which was named Best Short Film in the 2010 Philips Global Parallel-Lines Film-Making Contest.  The film was chosen from more than 600 entries from around the world, which were submitted by aspiring filmmakers who created original short films using the same brief six-line dialogue.  This year’s dialogue was: “What is that?  It’s a unicorn.  I’ve never seen one up close before.  Beautiful.  Get away, Get away.  I’m sorry.”

Porcelain Unicorn is a historical drama, which begins with an elderly man who is struggling with memories of 1943 Germany, a time when he was a member of the Hitler Youth Organization.  As a 12 year-old boy, he had broken into an abandoned Jewish shop and discovered a frightened young Jewish girl trying to hide from the Nazi storm troopers.  Their brief encounter in the situation of life-threatening danger led to a shared moment of tenderness, which forged a special relationship between the two children living in war-torn Europe.

The sense of mutuality in that critical experience provided a foundation for an enduring hope in the possibility for emotional healing.  The film invokes a message that conveys a strong conviction in the power of the human spirit to triumph over the trauma of catastrophic events.

Porcelain Unicorn: The Healing Power of the Human Spirit

(Best Viewed in HD Full-Screen Mode)

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Portraits of Life and Loss: The Holocaust and Beyond

Photographs by: Jeffrey Gusky, MD, Mt. Vernon, Texas

Portraits of Life and Loss pairs the work of Roman Vishniac and Jeffrey Gusky, two photographers who wandered the same areas some six decades apart.  Vishniac explored Poland’s Jewish villages of the 1930s and 1940s, documenting communities in peril during an era of growing anti-Semitism.  Gusky’s late-20th-century visits to the same country took him to the sites where those communities once stood.

While Vishniac captured the spirit of a people, their crowded, vibrant communities, pulsing with life, Gusky’s visual journey examines the ghosts they left behind.  Returning to the quiet landscapes that once nourished Jewish life, Gusky found crumbling synagogues, ghetto walls, and silent streets that once hosted bustling markets, and his photographs resound hauntingly, with an almost specter-like aura.

Photographs by Roman Vishniac: A Vanished World

Gorecki Symphony No. 3, “Symphony of Sorrowful Songs”

Slide Show: Portraits of Life and Loss/The Holocaust and Beyond

(Please Click Image to View Slide Show)

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