hello and welcome to a fistful of popcorn my name is carol welsh and on the moderator for tonight's show and with me i'm pleased to say i have two of our three regular panelist marilyn campbell and bob and howard wilkinson and mary would you like to give us a little summary plot summary ok well this is what they say is based on a true story it is the story of a american professor libelous even though it other people might see it as simply true and so this is the story she gets she gets the notice of notice of being sued and she goes to england and gets a solicitor and gets a barrister and they prepare her for court they discuss their strategy of how they're going to win the case or defend against against the suit and the trial takes place and i won't spoil it for you but basically they the strategy was to  prove that david irving knew that what he was saying in his books about the holocaust not being actually taking place that he knew that that was wrong and false and that his books his own book looks were full of false statements and that's the way they decided to defend instead of what deborah lipstadt wanted to do which what was to get a parade of witnesses how acoss arrivers of the concentration camps to parade on to the stand and tell their stories about what they witnessed and they said that's a bad strategy because these people are old and they're they're very emotional and they might fall apart under under cross examination and we don't want to put them through that that was the final word on that and i think that's about the yeah not so much yeah that's that's the plot i think this is a very appropriate movie for us to be talking about today really i do if i start first taping after separate as eventual action i think and i think this movie is is about historical truth versus a story lines and it's about racism and anti semitism and so i think it's it has a lot of reference to what we're going through right now it's interesting when i watch this film i thought this is a very these are very realistic courtroom scenes and you know they don't have the perry mason kind of moments that you usually see in courtroom dramas where you know there's a sudden you know revelation in the middle of testimony and i later learned when i read read about the movie that much of the does much of the courtroom dialogue is based on the actual transcripts as as a lawyer i found this very refreshing and i'm wondering how you felt about it did you feel that it  interesting enough to you well i think certain reviews have said when this movie first came out that it was a little on the dull side because there wasn't the kind of courtroom drama that we're used to from courtroom dramas where  barrister discussing with her exactly what their strategy was going to be and how it was going to play out in court and even their body language i thought i was very interested that the barrister and the barrister in england maybe you can do the barrister in england is the person who argues in court and the solicitor is the lawyer who prepares the case and does the research and all that stuff does all the prep and the barristers the one who stands up in court and  questions witnesses and there's a some asian in that and that sort of thing so the barrister is the one who is more of an actor and tom wilkinson plays him and he explains to deborah lipstadt at one point that part of his strategy is not looking david irving in the in the eye david irving also acted as his own own barrister when he defended him or we prosecuted the case himself he didn't have a trained barrister with him he thought he could do it him or responding to him because that's what he wants he wants to engage us he is a narcissist and what he wants is attention and you so you deny him attention and he will get agitated and he will make mistakes and that may indeed be relevant to the and wonder if certain people through they also for the same reason they opted for a a bench trial a trial where there was no jury and they got they got david irving to agree with and i love this kind of tricking him into agreeing that no jury could possibly understand all these complex a story facts so it should only be tried by the judge and that i thought that was wonderful well again they were playing to his vanity they were playing to his vanity and yes his movie at the jewish film festival was anybody and indeed there's quite a bit of humor in this movie it's a fish out of water story to some extent was anybody offend were you offended by that the human no i don't think there was there was a speaker there was a speaker after the movie who is a former graduate student of deborah lipstadt she teaches at emory university and this was someone who had graduated and was now is now teaching in the new york area so he was able to come and speak and he came on after the trial of which there there was money raised to for her defense fund right and there was left over and people also continued to give in order to help her set up a web site to deny the holocaust deniers it's called something like how a cause denial on trial d o t dot com dot org or something like that and he worked on that he worked on setting getting getting all kinds of facts and making sure that all these how cost in the years were answered in all the things that they said that that weren't weren't true and and i think that a lot of people asked questions about that and about how a continental in general but no one objected to the fact that felt that that was a bad strategy because it because in fact irving had had confrontations with holocaust survivors previously in which he had ridiculed them and made them very upset and made them suffer more from from you know why should they suffer more by having having someone make make fun of them or attack them and say that they had bad memories and you know they were they were old people and so on so no one no one really asked about that but deborah lipstadt also appeared with this film that the u s premier was at the u s holocaust memorial museum in washington and in that there was a panel discussion afterwards and many people in the off did ask questions and were upset but there were not how acoss survivors in the movie and deborah explained again what that why they didn't have it that that the people had bad venue courses dedicated to the hook memorial and were were felt that they that that the holocaust survivor should have had a voice in the trial and lose but not in the dream not in new brunswick yeah ok the  demonstrative in his sorrow as this horrible site and there's a lot going on between debra and and the english receiving the seem so emotionally restrained and she's like actually the internet is a very strange place because i went on you tube to see if i could see any you tube of deborah looked like only half and there is a lot there is but you know what they also brought up you know how they bring up other things you might want to see i think some of the other thing and she actually went there and said no i'm fine with libel law but as as the british as it is and britain i mean i'm fine with libel law but by but you know  particularly with people who are in the public sphere and the the bar for for having a libel action against someone who is in public is very very high and britain there is there's no that our first amendment limits live along that way now i will say that donald trump has talked about maybe changing that but it's a constitutional matter it would have to maybe not so in this if you make an arrow and you didn't mean to harm someone just sort of slip that's exactly right you have to have intentional and has the intentional fall so that malicious i believe right now actually there libeled him and but anyway apparently she had the best solicitors in the country because as is pointed out in the movie the solicitor who is representing her is  went on for like two months i think they said something like twenty three days it went through yes something like that for a long time yeah that's a very by america and the press and the prep took even longer the prep they said they prepped for a year and that's another thing i about it is that it really showed the lawyer just get into the nitty gritty and learn their case you know they learned about the holocaust inside out i mean in some ways this is a  that's a movie only a lawyer can live i don't think so but then i have an interest as well which i should add about is that i have worked with deborah lipstadt wreckers university press has a series called key words in jewish studies and her word was holocaust which is a very it's a very interesting book about how the actual people right after the war could end had it took years before holocaust was used and then when longer before it became a general term because people right after the war just couldn't even conceptualize what happened and they were just floating around saying settled on the holocaust but then she also talks about how the word holocaust has been used since for other events right that may or may not be the same the of the same largeness  been yeah somewhat stretched in ways that people who are survivors for instance find very disturbing so while we were working on this book together it came out last accent apparently she was on set for about the first two weeks of shooting and then at some point rachael vice came to her and said i'm really deeply in your character now and it's very distracting for me to have to  and maybe the reason is this kind of slow this this stranded yeah dry yeah it's not it doesn't play it doesn't play as as as the strategy was not to let david  deliberate strategy they didn't want to prove in court that the how how cost occurred they wanted to prove they wanted he was lying yes yes and they wanted to keep the focus on him exact and destroy him right and so they didn't want to get into discussions because which he had been doing on all kinds of speaking tours in interview shows and getting a lot of publicity mileage out of discussing why he acoss did not occur and how there's never you know there were gas chambers and hitler knew nothing about it and cetera et cetera et cetera and challenging people to come up with documents and and things written down and so on and so so bob had a choice of seeing two films and saw one and i the last ten days so i can film jewish film festival of record including  denial and denial was one of the better films but there are a couple others i might mention to our viewers that if they can see and on netflix or that might open the closing film of the of the festival is called the women's balcony it's an israeli film about a small congregation that is rocked by getting a new rabbi who doesn't change stuff and it was really very funny and a premier in north america at the toronto film festival where it played well local sort of a local guy a philadelphia chef and restaurant owner in philadelphia to cook the restaurant because of harlem and it is an israeli cuisine restaurant but he went to israel with this documentary film maker and that sort of didn't anthony boudin what run around the country and sample cuisine from various cities and various and they the idea was that there are a lot of different ethnic are there are christian arab dishes there are muslim arab dishes there are israeli dishes from all over there and there's you know supported jews in this ashkenazi jews and there's jews from soviet russia and there's all these would beard award winning chef and he's just so enthusiastic there are two places where he goes and sample some food somewhere and he puts in his mouth and  he didn't think much about ask analogy to the scene and he said this is like a pan like this comes out of the oven and he said we just ate the whole page we just devoured that whole thing it was so in real life too i shan't the pissed off and they got that across yes i got that across well we want to thank you for joining us today today for a fistful of popcorn and when we're talking about denial and we hope