Film Screening + Q&A
Join us for a film screening with Anderson Center Artist-In-Residence Melissa Hacker! Enjoy her documentary My Knees Were Jumping: Remembering the Kindertransports, followed by audience Q & A. Light refreshments will be served.
intimate…heartfelt…The speakers remember how their parents made the decision, as wrenching
as Sophie’s choice, to part with their children, possibly forever, on the eve of war…
Janet Maslin, THE NEW YORK TIMES
A simple and eloquent documentary…While many may feel that they know all they need to about the Holocaust from movies like “Schindler’s List” and “Shoah,” this quiet film makes the horror vivid all over again. And it does so not by the use of gory images, but by showing the faces behind the statistics.
About the Film:
Melissa Hacker is an award-winning filmmaker who made her directing debut with the documentary My Knees Were Jumping; Remembering the Kindertransports, which was short-listed for Academy Award nomination, seen in film festivals, museums, universities, on broadcast and streaming television worldwide and released theatrically in New York City. Melissa’s video Venus, filmed at the Josephinium Medical History Museum, was featured in the exhibit “Objects of Devotion and Desire: Medieval Relic to Contemporary Art,” and received accolades in the New York Times review. Melissa ‘s recent short film 256,000 miles from home has screened at the Goethe Institutes in London and Glasgow, the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York, and the Cleveland International Film Festival in April 2026. Melissa has spoken internationally on the Kindertransports, curated The Kindertransport Journey: Memory into History at the Holocaust Memorial and Tolerance Center in Glen Cove, consulted on the exhibit, Rescuing Children on the Brink of War at the Center for Jewish History in New York, and written for the catalog and provided film excerpts for Without a Home: Kindertransports from Vienna, at the Vienna Jewish Museum.
Melissa is currently directing Ex Libris, A Life in Bookplates, an animated documentary on her Austrian grandfather’s life and bookplate collection. Honors received include a Fulbright Artist-in-Residence award in Vienna, and residencies at Yaddo, Saltonstall, Millay and the Anderson Center at Tower View. Melissa is the Executive Director of the Kindertransport Association, a native New Yorker, and a wandering professor, most recently at Yangon Film School in Myanmar and Marymount Manhattan College in NYC.