04/14
2025
Film

For the Living: Film and Conversation

6:00 pm - 8:30 pm
Portland Campus for the Health Sciences (WCHP Lecture Hall in Parker Pavilion )
Open to the public with free ticket reserved in advance.
  • 5 - 6 pm Parker Pavilion, Welcome Reception
  • 6 - 8 pm WCHP Lecture Hall, Film Screening
  • 8 - 8:30 Conversation with the Filmmakers

In January 1945, after two years as prisoner in a death camp, 10-year-old Holocaust survivor Marcel Zielinksi embarked on a perilous 60-mile journey by foot from Auschwitz-Birkenau through an active war zone to Krakow, Poland. A child’s desperate search for any surviving family members. A journey from Darkness to Light.

Decades later, 250 cyclists from 12 different countries traveled to Auschwitz-Birkenau and re-traced 84-year-old Marcel’s liberation path as a collective act of empathy called the “Ride for the Living.â€

Marcel’s dehumanizing Holocaust experience and the empathy demonstrated during the Ride for the Living provide a parallel for humankind’s equally perilous journey between the two extremes of our nature: Dehumanization to Empathy. Darkness to Light.

Igniting the conversation: When will we stop building monuments to the Dead and get busy re-humanizing the Living? When will we finally say NEVER AGAIN and truly mean it?

After the film, audience members will enjoy the exclusive opportunity to converse with the film’s writer/director Tim Roper and producer Lisa Effress, as well as Â鶹´«Ã½Professor David Livingstone Smith, Ph.D., who appears as an expert commentator in the film.

This screening will be the film’s Maine premiere. Released: October 2024

1 hour, 57 minutes

Address

716 Stevens Avenue
Portland, ME 04103
United States

For the Living Film Poster