Blu-ray, DVD Release: Europa Europa

By
Laurence
– July 9, 2019Find Others: Blu-ray, DVD, Movie, New Release, NewsGet More: , ,

Blu-ray & DVD Release Date: July 9, 2019
Price: DVD $17.97, Blu-ray $22.97
Studio: Criterion

Agnieszka Holland‘s (Washington Square) 1990 wartime tour de force Europa Europa is a breathless survival story.

As World War II splits Europe, sixteen-year-old German Jew Salomon (Marco Hofschneider) is separated from his family after fleeing with them to Poland, and finds himself reluctantly assuming various ideological identities in order to hide the deadly secret of his Jewishness. He is bounced from a Soviet orphanage, where he plays a dutiful Stalinist, to the Russian front, where he hides in plain sight as an interpreter for the German army, and back to his home country, where he takes on his most dangerous role: a member of the Hitler Youth.

Based on the real-life experiences of Salomon Perel, Holland’s film plays out like a comic adventure. Ultimately, it is an ironic refutation of the Nazi idea of racial purity, and a complex portrait of a young man caught up in shifting historical calamities and struggling to stay alive.

Criterion’s new editions contain the following:

* New 2K digital restoration, supervised by director Agnieszka Holland, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
* Audio commentary from 2008 featuring Holland
* New interviews with Holland and actor Marco Hofschneider
* New video essay by film scholar Annette Insdorf
* New English subtitle translation
* An essay by critic Amy Taubin

 

Buy or Rent Europa Europa

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About Laurence

Founder and editor Laurence Lerman saw Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest when he was 13 years old and that’s all it took. He has been writing about film and video for more than a quarter of a century for magazines, anthologies, websites and most recently, Video Business magazine, where he served as the Reviews Editor for 15 years.