Movie Thoughts: Misha and the Wolves (2021)

 

• Released: January 31, 2021
• Directed by: Sam Hobkinson
• Running time: 1 h 30 min
• Rating: 4/5

Synopsis

A documentary about Misha Defonseca, a woman who wrote a Holocaust memoir that later turned out to be fabricated.

My Thoughts

If you're properly caught up with both of my review blogs (book reviews and this one where I cover movies) you'll know that I reviewed both the memoir Defonseca wrote and the movie adaptation based on it.

But to catch you up to speed: Misha Defonseca (also known as Monique de Waal) is a Belgian woman who in 1997 published a Holocaust memoir detailing how she was a little girl got separated from her parents, who were deported. Being Jewish, she was placed in the care of a cruel family, before she eventually ran away and walked across many miles east in hopes of finding her parents, without any success. During her travels she was temporarily taken in by a friendly wolf pack.

That story in and of itself, of a seven-years old girl walking hundreds of miles in the cold winter during the middle of a war and befriending a wolf pack, sounds hard to believe, of course, but it was told as truth and widely believed and a movie adaptation based on the book was eventually released. But it was later discovered that there were some discrepancies in the story, leading to eventually the truth being unmasked: it was basically one large hoax. And a very insensitive one as well, as Misha herself isn't even Jewish. She does have a sad story in WWII as well, don't get me wrong, but it's not at all as how it was described in the book.

This documentary goes in-depth on the story of Misha Defonseca and the people around her. First establishing her story and how the book got made, then several lawsuits, and of course the eventual reveals of her lying and figuring out what her true story and identity is.

It's a documentary with emotional moments and also quite a bit of infuriating moments with Defonseca herself, of course. It's well-shot and consistently kept me engaged, though it did feel a tad drawn-out at times. But overall this was a good documentary and I liked how we slowly build up more and more to the discoveries.

Defonseca did not appear herself to be interviewed in the documentary, but there's some archive footage from her shown. I honestly would've liked to hear her side of the story, what excuses she could possibly have to fake a memoir like this over the backs of actual Jewish Holocaust survivors. But I understand if they couldn't get her for the documentary.

I read the book a while back (intially thinking it was real) and later watched the movie after finding out the story was a hoax (something that was not widely known at the time of the film's release), and now I feel that this documentary makes for some nice closure regarding the subject for me, with the full story being laid out including what actually happened in Defonseca's childhood. Not just her own fabrications.

Overall a well-shot documentary that thoroughly kept my attention. Defonseca is an interesting character to be sure, but not in a good way.