section KINO FERMISHED

The President's Tailor

  • Rick Minnich
  • DE
  • 2024
  • 39

From Auschwitz to the White House: This is the life story of Martin Greenfield, Holocaust survivor and later tailor to every US president since Eisenhower. There is one thing, as Greenfield emphasises time and again, that he refuses to let go of: his smile.

At 90, Martin Greenfield still works in the same New York tailor shop where he started on a temporary basis after the Second World War, one he later took over and which is now run by his sons. For decades this cheerful gentleman has provided one US president after another with hand-made suits. There was no one he admired as much as Dwight D. Eisenhower however: years before his presidency, as General Dwight D. Eisenhower, he oversaw the liberation of the Buchenwald concentration camp by US armed forces and it was there that he met Greenfield, who thanked him for saving his life. This documentary takes the viewer on a journey through the different stages of the Holocaust survivor's life: starting in a small Ukrainian village with a once-significant Jewish community, the place where he was born Maximilian Grünfeld, on to Auschwitz and later Buchenwald, where he lost his family, and finally to New York, the place where he founded a new family and found a calling as a tailor.

Text: Dominique Ott-Despoix
English: Peter Rickerby


Runs together mit THREE ATTEMPTS AT GOYIFICATION (Michaela Kobsa-Mark, DE 2023, 47 min).


Following the screening on 19.6. at Bundeplatz Kino there will be a Q&A with director Rick Minnich.


Credits

original title The President's Tailor

international title The President's Tailor

german title The President's Tailor

JFBB section KINO FERMISHED

  • director Rick Minnich

country/countries DE

year 2024

duration 39