My Neighbor Adolf (Centerpiece Narrative)

Centerpiece Narrative

Due to the SAG-AFTRA strike, actor Udo Kier is no longer expected to attend

Cranky and a bit of a misanthrope, Marek Polsky has survived the war and the camps and resettled in a South American village, where he seems content to tend his roses, play chess games in his head, and mutter to himself. But it’s 1960, Adolf Eichmann has just been seized in Argentina, and now Polsky is suspiciously eyeing the secretive German-speaking elderly man who has moved in next door. It’s alarming: The man bears an uncanny resemblance to Adolf Hitler. Not only that, this ostensible neighbor “Herzog” has a German shepherd, a penchant for painting, an expansionist agenda, and a ferocious temper. When no one takes Polsky’s suspicions seriously, he decides to take matters into his own hands, daring to establish a wary acquaintanceship with the neighbor in order to gain positive proof of Herzog’s true, monstrous identity. Leon Prudovsky’s delicate comic drama effortlessly toggles between farce and pathos, charm and suspense, as the two antagonists set out on a cat-and-mouse game of deception and discovery. There is real delight in the film’s two central performances: David Hayman’s Polsky is a hair-trigger bundle of (well-earned) grievances laced with sorrow, and the legendary Udo Kier brings enough erratic menace to Herzog to keep not only his neighbor but all of us wondering...could he really be Adolf after all?

Bay Area Premiere