‘The Survivor’s Barry Levinson & Ben Foster On How Family History & Current Events Gave Resonance To Harry Haft Drama – Contenders TV

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For their HBO Max film The Survivor, which chronicles the real-life journey of Harry Haft, a concentration camp prisoner forced to box to survive his internment, both director Barry Levinson and star Ben Foster found compelling connections to the story through their own families, as well as disturbing parallels to currently unfolding history.“I was about five years old and late 40s living with my parents and my grandparents in a small house, and a man showed up at the door,” recalled Levinson during Deadline’s Contenders Television panel alongside Foster. “His name was Simka and it turned out that it was my grandmother’s brother – and I never knew she had a brother – and they started talking to one another in a language which I didn’t understand.”Levinson recounted how his great-uncle stayed with the family for two weeks in the bedroom across from the future filmmaker. “I woke up one night because he was thrashing about in bed, he was speaking a language and he was yelling out and he’s tossing and turning and then he fell back asleep.

And night after night after night. The same thing would occur.”Years after Simka’s departure, a teenaged Levinson would learn the origin of his relative’s distress during a conversation with his mother. “She says ‘Well, you know Simka, when he was in a concentration camp…’ I said ‘He was in a concentration camp?’ And then she started to tell me a few things.”Later, reading the screenplay for The Survivor, Levinson was struck by its exploration of the disturbing echoes of trauma. “Those who have survived trauma – in this case, a concentration camp – once it’s over, it’s not like ‘Well, okay, that’s done and now you get on with your life.’ Now we call it post-traumatic stress disorder; now we