VETERAN JOURNALIST AND DIRECTOR / PRODUCER MARISA FOX’S GRIPPING NEW INVSTIGATIVE AND PERSONAL DOCUMENTARYS TO HAVE ITS WORLD PREMIERE AT THE 45TH SAN FRANCISCO JEWISH FILM FESTIVALAN ON SATURDAY, AUGUST 2 AT THE PIEDMONT THEATER.
High-profile producing team includes producer Oscar-winning Deborah Shaffer and executive producers Oscar-winner Deborah Oppenheimer, Nancy Spielberg, and Primetime Emmy-winning producer Michael Berenbaum
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.
More information on the film is available at
http://myundergroundmother.com/.