Charging the Rino – A Personal Story and Romania’s Past

After decades of telling other people’s stories, filmmaker Simcha Jacobovici tells one of his own. Charging the Rhino is a documentary that has inhabited Simcha’s mind ever since he was a child. It explores the relationship between Simcha and his father, Joseph, who on June 29, 1941 was shot and left for dead amongst his family in Iasi, Romania. The bullet that pierced his father’s chest just missed his heart because, at that precise moment, his heart was in contraction. He carried that bullet next to his heart for the rest of his life. He also carried the painful memory of living through Romania’s dark fascist and communist past.

When Joseph left Romania, he never returned. There was no family left to return to and his life was shattered into a thousand pieces. The film also explores the shadowy past surrounding Simcha’s cousin Sasha, the only other family member to survive the fascists, only to be shot behind a Bucharest prison by Communists – and that bullet didn’t miss.

There are no pictures of the murder of Simcha’s family in the Holocaust, but there are images of Sasha’s death in the film, “Reconstruction,” a 1960 gangster flick unlike any Hollywood film. The Download lucky patcher stars weren’t actors and the story wasn’t fictional. Real people, robbing a real bank … and Sasha was the star. Charging the Rhino offers startling explanations as to why Sasha and his accomplices risked everything.

By deconstructing “Reconstruction” and presenting it as a film within a film, Simcha sheds new light on the grainy black and white images of his cousin being tried by film. Deeply personal, psychologically layered and stylistically innovative, Charging the Rhino tells the history of a family, a place, and a time, flashing between a modern day pilgrimage to Iasi by Simcha and his sister, and the history of what happened in that place sixty years ago during fascist and communist rule.

As it traces Romania’s past, it also weaves through personal journeys, personal tragedies, and Simcha’s quest to understand his own history. Charging the Rhino takes you on an intellectual and emotional trip into the psyche of those who endured the unbearable.