Atlanta Jewish Film Festival: From Darkness to Light

Never-before-seen footage reveals the tortured creative process and haunting failure behind comedy legend Jerry Lewis’s mythical, abandoned Holocaust project. Lewis starred in and directed The Day the Clown Cried, a misguided 1972 Swedish-French endeavor in which he played a hapless German clown imprisoned by the Nazis and coerced into leading Jewish children to the gas chambers. Never completed or released, the maudlin film embarrassed Lewis who kept silent about it for years. Extensive research uncovered long-lost materials that are now restored and given context. Interviews with cast and crew, and insights from filmmaker Martin Scorsese and actor Harry Shearer, and Lewis himself, offer fascinating reflections on the delusional nature of one of cinema’s most infamous follies.