Roosevelt Island Women's Movie Group Showing Watermarks May 15 At Gallery RIVAA - Film About Champion Austrian Women Swimmers Lives Changed By Nazi Anschluss

Image From Watermarks

From the Roosevelt Island Women's Movie Group:

Dive into the water with our next film: Watermarks, Thursday, May 15, 2014 at 7:00 pm in Gallery RIVAA at 527 Main Street.

For young, sports-minded Jewish women of Vienna in 1933, participating in swimming competition with the sports club Hakoah was an all-consuming experience. Training and friendships were the fabric of their lives, until the Nazis invaded Austria.

Learn what happened to these teenage athletes and be part of their reunion as 80-year olds.

Suggested minimum donation is $7 to cover our room rental costs.

Please reply and RSVP to riwomenmovie@gmail.com and plan to bring healthy snacks or drinks for six guests.

Feel free to invite your friends and neighbors.

According to the Watermarks synopsis:

Watermarks is the story of the champion women swimmers of the legendary Jewish sports club, Hakoah Vienna. Hakoah (“The Strength" in Hebrew) was founded in 1909 in response to the notorious Aryan Paragraph, which forbade Austrian sports clubs from accepting Jewish athletes. Its founders were eager to popularize sport among a community renowned for such great minds as Freud, Mahler and Zweig, but traditionally alien to physical recreation. Hakoah rapidly grew into one of Europe's biggest athletic clubs, while achieving astonishing success in many diverse sports. In the 1930s Hakoah's best-known triumphs came from its women swimmers, who dominated national competitions in Austria. After the Anschluss, the political unification of Nazi Germany and Austria in 1938, the Nazis shut down the club, but the swimmers managed to flee the country before the war broke out, thanks to an escape operation organized by Hakoah’s functionaries.

Sixty-five years later, director Yaron Zilberman meets the members of the women’s swim team in their homes around the world, and arranges for them to have a reunion in their old swimming pool in Vienna, a journey that evokes memories of youth, femininity, and strengthens lifelong bonds. Told by the swimmers, now in their eighties, Watermarks is about a group of young girls with a passion to be the best. It is the saga of seven outstanding athletes who still swim daily as they age with grace....

Here's the trailer for Watermarks.