Film
Misha and the Wolves
- Director
- Sam Hobkinson
- Certificate
- 12A
- Running Time
- 89 mins
Back in 1997, American woman Misha Defonseca published an extraordinary memoir. Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years told of how the Nazis deported her Jewish parents from Belgium to Germany, prompting the seven-year-old Misha to embark on an epic journey to find them. Along the way, she was adopted by a pack of wolves. The book was translated into 20 languages, sold millions of copies and inspired a French film. Needless to say, Oprah loved it and Disney wanted to option it. There was just one problem: Defonseca made the whole thing up. Once investigators got their teeth into her story, it swiftly collapsed, leading to years of legal battles, enormous fines and embarrassment all round.
British director Sam Hobkinson‘s engrossing documentary treats the Misha affair as a detective story, the bigger question being: how and why could anyone believe such a preposterous yarn? It’s particularly timely in an era when the concept of objective truth is under fire from fake news and the slippery notion of ‘personal truth’ that so appeals to wokesters.
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