Publicist
Marisa Fox showing a photo of her mother to a survivor from her hometown of Sosnowiec. Credit: Andrew Abrahams
Your Mother Never Told You?' New Film Spotlights Sexual Violence in Nazi Labor Camps - Judy Maltz, Haaretz
Journalist thought her Israeli freedom-fighter mother hid something big. She was right. -Renee Ghert-Zand, Times of Israel
‘My Underground Mother’ Uncovers a Hidden Holocaust History - Rae Alexandra, KQED
MY UNDERGROUND MOTHER -- Marisa Fox Interview - Andrea Chase, Behind the Scenes/PRX.org
Marisa Fox unearths an incredible survival story -- her mother's The World Premiere of My Underground Mother Brooke Berman, writer, director, https://ramonaatmidlife.substack
I’m One of the Filmmakers DOGE Targeted at the NEH. Here’s Why We’re in Trouble (Guest Column) A documentarian describes what she and many of her peers have been going through as the Trump administration makes drastic cuts to the National Endowment for the Humanities. - Marisa Fox, Hollywood Reporter https://www.hollywoodreporter.com
Counting the Cost of Cuts to the Arts & Filmmaking Communities https://podcasts.apple.com
A person walks in front of the National Endowment for the Humanities building on April 11, 2025 in Washington, DC. The NEH has seen many of its grants terminated by DOGE. KAYLA BARTKOWSKI/GETTY IMAGES
Will federal funding cuts spell the end for history documentaries? The National Endowment for the Humanities is among the most reliable sources of funding for the genre. Terminated grants have filmmakers “living in a moment of crisis.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/
Love Child, Holocaust Survivor, 'Freedom Fighter': The Secret Life Love Child, Holocaust Survivor, ‘Freedom Fighter’: The Secret Life My Mother Kept Underground -Marisa Fox, Haaretz https://www.haaretz.com
It’s Time For A Holocaust #MeToo Reckoning -Marisa Fox, Forward https://forward.com
PRESS RELEASES
FREEDOM FIGHTER, DOUBLE AGENT, FEMME FATALE
Tamar said she was all three. Decades after her death a page she wrote in a diary from a Nazi-run women’s camp reveals a hidden identity, leading her daughter on a global reckoning with secrets she took to her grave.
A FILM THAT UNIQUELY ADDRESSES HOLOCAUST SEXUAL TRAUMA AND AGENCY, THAT GIVES WOMEN SURVIVORS THE PLATFORM TO TELL THEIR STORIES IN THEIR OWN VOICES.
Screeners and Interviews Available Now
SAN FRANCISCO / OAKLAND – WHAT’S THE PRICE OF SILENCE? That's the driving question behind a new documentary from veteran journalist and magazine editor Marisa Fox. My Underground Mother focuses on her decade-long search for her late mother’s hidden past.
Premiering at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival on August 2, Fox’s gripping, first person narrative and directorial debut unfolds like a detective story highlighting a secret journal from a Jewish women’s camp that reveals a shocking story of Nazi trafficking, sexual violence and empowering agency told by a band of sisters who became resistors when they were mere teenagers. Fox tracks down the camp’s remaining survivors all around the world who break their silence 80 years after WWII as she yearns to reconcile with a mother who claimed she wasn’t a "Holocaust victim."
The film is directed, produced, and written by Marisa Fox, with additional producers Oscar-winner Deborah Shaffer (Witness to War) and Kelly Sheehan (Four Seasons Lodge). Executive producers of the film include Oscar-winner Deborah Oppenheimer (Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport), veteran film producer Nancy Spielberg (A Letter to David and other prominent films), and Primetime Emmy-winning producer and Holocaust museum executive Michael Berenbaum (One Survivor Remembers).
Members of the production team also include Emmy-winning director of photograph Slawomir Grunberg, composer Wendy Blackstone (one of the first women members of the AMPAS Music Branch), Peabody Award-winner Rachel Reichman, A.C.E. editor Keith Reamer, Halil Efrat (2025 Oscar shortlist The Bibi Files), and award-winning animation artist Molly Schwartz (Lady Bird Diaries, U.S. & the Holocaust, Watchers of the Sky).
SFJFF SYNOPSIS: Twenty years after her mother’s death, journalist Marisa Fox unearths a family secret. She knew her mom as Tamar, the infamous redheaded freedom fighter in British mandate Palestine—not as Hela, a Polish-born survivor of a Jewish women’s forced labor camp in Nazi-occupied Sudetenland. As Marisa delves deeper, she discovers her mother’s writing in a journal written by the camp’s teenage prisoners and tracks them down across the globe. They share a shocking, untold story of sexual trauma and agency, as Marisa reckons with the postwar shaming that fueled her mother’s reinvention. Riveting written and filmed testimonies, striking animation, and compelling vérité footage track a daughter’s search for an unknown mother, revealing a harrowing story of sisterhood and resistance.
My Underground Mother has been made with assistance from The National Endowment for the Humanities, the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany supported by the German Federal Ministry of Finance, Jewish Story Partners, the New York State Council on the Arts, the NYC Women’s Fund for Media, Music and Theatre, presented by the City of New York Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment, in Association with the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Jewish Film Institute and many private foundations.
My Underground Mother will have its world premiere at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival on Saturday, August 2nd at 8:30 p.m. at Piedmont Theatre in Oakland, CA. Director and producer Marisa Fox and producer Deborah Shaffer will participate in the post-screening conversation.
ABOUT THE DIRECTOR
A veteran print, broadcast (WNET, VH1, Fx) and digital journalist, Marisa Fox has produced social impact campaigns for Hearst, earning American Society of Magazine Editors awards and nominations. She has written extensively on gender, genocide, sexual trauma and extremism (The Daily Beast, CNN, Ms.,The New York Times, Elle, Health, The Forward and Haaretz, where she was a U.S. correspondent) and is a “she source” for the Women’s Media Center, started by Gloria Steinem.
©Marisa Fox ~ My Underground Mother 2025