Review: In ELI, To Err Is Human, Redemption Uncertain

Picture the tracks along which boxcars carried Jews to the death camps. Then, the tracks along which an old man paces and recalls the horrors of that traumatic time. These are the tracks which Colin Gerard's ELI revisits through the mind's eye of a survivor.

As Eli Epstein ( David Gant) waits his turn for a doctor's appointment, another patient ( Kathryn Hanke) is railing at the preferential treatment being given to the foreigners who are invading her country. Her nativist rant is not lost on the attendant and the others seated in the waiting room. One of them, scornful of the woman's behavior, notices a concentration camp serial number on Eli's arm and hails him as a hero.

It is then that Eli shares his story. A young man arrives in the barracks pleading to know what offense has led him there. He goes to bed and places his shoes beneath his bunk. The next morning, they are gone. When he pleads to the guard for new shoes, he is viciously beaten to death.

It is an agonizing tale told in the course of a riveting and unsettling eleven minutes. In this adaptation of a story by Ran Appleberg, Gerard's dramatization (accentuated by Dirk Nel's cinematography) raises questions about human nature, forgiveness, and the possibility of redemption. Gant, gaunt and forlorn, is stellar and captivating as a man, albeit liberated, still a captive of the past.

Neither time nor space can derail survivor guilt nor the price one paid to be among the living. As Viktor Frankl noted in Man's Search for Meaning, "No man should judge unless he asks himself in absolute honesty whether in a similar situation he might not have done the same." This is the challenge we confront in considering Eli's story.

ELI is one of the short films to be featured at this year's Sedona International Film Festival.

Photo credit to 7 Colli Productions