The Last Happy Day2009

A portrait of a doctor who saw the worst of society and ran. The Last Happy Day is an experimental documentary portrait of Sandor (Alexander) LENARD, A Hungarian medical doctor and a distant cousin of filmmaker Lynne Sachs. In 1938 Lenard, a writer with a Jewish background, fled the Nazis to a safe haven in Rome. Shortly thereafter, the U.S. Army Grave Registration Service hired Lenard to reconstruct the bone – small and large – of dead American soldiers. Eventually he found himself in remotest Brazil where he embarked on the translation of "Winne the Pooh" into Latin, an eccentric task that catapulted him to brief world-wide fame. Sachs' essay film uses personal letters, abstracted war imagery, home movies, interviews, and a childrens's performance to create an intimate meditation on the destructive power of war.

"A fascinating, unconventional approach to a Holocaust-related story...a frequently charming work that makes no effort to disguise an underlying melancholy." - George Robinson, The Jewish Week

Premiere:  New York Film Festival “View from the Avant-Garde” 2009, Black Maria Film Festival Director’s Choice Award; SF Cinematheque; Pacific Film Archive; Hungarian Nat’l TV Broadcast; One of the 10 Best Undistributed Film of 2009 (Film Comment)