My Underground Mother

A daughter investigates her mother’s secret past, discovering astonishing revelations about her life as a spy and freedom fighter against the Nazis in this absorbing and intimate documentary debut from New York journalist Marisa Fox. Twenty years after the death of her mother, Tamar, Fox begins to piece together a puzzle that spans Israel, Poland, and beyond, leading her to the discovery of a teenage sisterhood that formed within a Jewish women’s forced labor camp in Nazi-occupied Sudetenland to stand in brave resistance to the evils of the Holocaust, including sexual assault. Both a tale of female empowerment during World War II and a contemporary journey of a woman coming to terms with a parent’s unreconciled legacy, Fox’s film is an ever-expanding story of one woman’s refusal to be defined by trauma.