Faculty member's film scheduled for screening at Museum of Tolerance

A film by award-winning filmmaker and Penn State faculty member will be screened in mid-November at the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles.

The free public screening of an advanced rough cut of “Cojot” — Boaz Dvir’s feature-length documentary about a Holocaust survivor who set out to kill his father’s Nazi executioner — is scheduled for 7 p.m. Nov. 14.

The event will also feature a question-and-answer session with Dvir, the assistant professor who is directing and producing “Cojot,” and Olivier Cojot, son of the documentary’s protagonist, the late Michel Cojot. 

Also in attendance will be another one of Michel Cojot’s four children, Stephane Cojot, a portrait  photographer who has exhibited his work in galleries around the world, and Matthew Einstein, CEO of Tradition Pictures in Los Angeles who serves as one of the film’s producers.

Museum of Tolerance director Liebe Geft will moderate the Q&A, which will also include University of Florida Associate Professor Gayle Zachmann, one of the film's producers and its historical consultant. To RSVP, click here.

This is the third time Olivier Cojot, Paris-based vice chairman of Ellington, will share the stage with Dvir, an award-winning filmmaker (“Jessie’s Dad” and “A Wing and a Prayer”) who teaches journalism in the Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications. They previously engaged in dialogues with audiences at “Cojot” rough-cut screenings in New York and Philadelphia.

Olivier was 11 when his father hunted down former Gestapo commander Klaus Barbie in La Paz, Bolivia. A year later, in 1976, they became hostages in Entebbe, Uganda.

Narrated by iconic actor Judd Nelson — John Bender in "The Breakfast Club" — the documentary has been generating a buzz. After watching an early rough cut last year, The Guardian’s Hadley Freeman wrote: “It wasn’t until I saw Boaz Dvir’s very moving forthcoming documentary about him, ‘Cojot,’ that I truly understood Michel’s life, and perhaps the message of it.”

WPSU, Penn State’s NPR affiliate, devoted an episode of its “Take Note” to the documentary.