Amanda Rubin

Film director Amanda Rubin describes how her research for an animated film about unsettling dreams chronicled by a Jewish woman, Charlotte Beradt, in Nazi Germany led to the publication of Beradt’s diaries in English after they had been out of print for 40 years.

The Third Reich of Dreams: The Nightmares of a Nation is a diary collection of Beradt’s own dreams and those recounted by her friends and neighbours. Beradt, a journalist and communist activist, began having unsettling dreams after Hitler came to power in 1933. She imagined herself being shot at, tortured and scalped. Beradt escaped Germany in 1939 and the diaries were not published until the 1960s. Rubin is in the late stages of developing an expressionist animated film based on rare archival footage and verbatim testimony including the diaries. While researching the film, she discovered the lost English rights to Beradt’s book.

Rubin is a documentary filmmaker and journalist. Her work includes Danceworks for BBC Four, films for Channel 4’s Cutting Edge and The New Russia for Channel 4.

Part of the festival’s programme of Jewish and Hebrew literature and culture.