Tickling Leo Adds to Holocaust Film Grammar of Succeeding Generations

Details

Tickling Leo
Directed by Jeremy Davidson
Barn Door Productions
Opens September 4, Quad Cinema

Related Content

• Blood and Gifts: The History Boys
  November 23, 2011
• Pulitzer Winning Clybourne Park: My Review
  April 19, 2012
• BLOOD TIES
  February 29, 2012
• LOVER & FIGHTER
  October 19, 2011
• In Heaven Underground: The Weissensee Jewish Cemetery
  November 16, 2011

More About

• Jeremy Davidson
• Zak Pikler
• Lawrence Pressman
• Daniel Sauli
• Annie Parisse

Like this Story?

Sign up for the Events Newsletter: What's happening in town? From underground club nights to the biggest outdoor festivals, our top picks for the week's best events will always keep you in on the action.

Privacy Policy Cancel Continue

A new Holocaust film grammar is forming about what it means to be a succeeding generation, suspended between the impulse to forget and the urgent need to remember—and to understand how suppressed memories have warped families. I don't know how close writer-director Jeremy Davidson's own family is to the Shoah, but his debut feature is a perceptive example of the subgenre. On Yom Kippur, Zak Pikler (Daniel Sauli) reluctantly takes his pregnant girlfriend, Delphina (Annie Parisse), to visit his estranged father, Warren (the excellent Lawrence Pressman), a poet succumbing to paranoia and his tortured past in a Catskills lakeside home. Davidson weaves deeper questions of who a Jew is into this powerful tale of a clan shredded by the rage and hatred passed down through three generations. Shot in digital video, Tickling Leo gradually reveals a secret about one of those terrible wartime bargains with the Third Reich that saved a few Jews while sealing the fate of an entire community. Davidson handles the material with candor, sensitivity, and a goodness and mercy that's entirely absent from the showy self-pity of Boaz Yakin's recent Death in Love.