The Optimist, the new feature from Oakland native writer-director Finn Taylor, premieres on March 11 in theaters. The 102-minute film dramatizes the life of Herbert Heller, a beloved Marin County figure who survived Nazi concentration camps. Heller, who died in 2021, devoted his later years to educating younger generations about the Holocaust—a legacy the film itself extends.
Producer Jeanine Thomas met Heller (then in his mid-80s) in 2014, after he’d sold his San Rafael clothing store, Heller’s for Children. At the time, Heller was speaking at schools and to youth groups, sharing his family’s experience as Czech Jews during World War II. “I felt [Heller’s] story should be known by the world,” Thomas says. “And for this to happen, a film needed to be created.” Taylor, who’d been making independent features since 1997’s acclaimed Dream with the Fishes, was Thomas’s ideal writer for the project. By the time of the film’s completion, their real-life subject had passed away, at age 92.
The film is mostly set in Marin in the early aughts. Heller, played by actor Stephen Lang (Colonel Quaritch in Avatar), is a kindly septuagenarian, deeply involved in his community. While giving an interview to a foundation preserving Holocaust-survivor stories, he meets intern Abby (Elsie Fisher, who starred in Bo Burnham’s Eighth Grade), a withdrawn teen bullied by peers and ignored by her self-absorbed parents.
To coax Abby out of her shell, Heller insists she be the one to record his story—in exchange for her sharing some of her own. The result is a testimony of contemporary adolescence, interwoven with flashbacks to Heller’s horrific wartime memories.
Born into a middle-class Czech family, Heller led a relatively carefree childhood until Nazi ideology and occupation targeted “undesirables.” In 1942, the Hellers were sent to Terezin camp, where in an effort to mislead both the Western allies and, on occasion, Red Cross inspectors, conditions were made to appear somewhat humane. They were relocated to Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944; only some of the Hellers survived. At the camp, Heller met the notorious “Angel of Death,” medical experimenter Josef Mengele, and distinguished Austrian Jewish composer Viktor Ullmann, who was gassed in 1944. After the war, in 1946, Heller relocated to the United States. He climbed from bottom-rung retail work to store owner, eventually running the clothing shop that outfitted generations of Marin children, sometimes with his own designs.
The Optimist is concerned with trauma recovery, portrayed through the narratives of Heller and Abby. For Taylor, the production was new territory; his prior films were low-budget seriocomedies often shot in the Bay Area. For this film, he shot on two continents and reconstructed two time periods.
“It was hard for me not to notice three things growing rapidly over the last five years while making this film,” Taylor says. “The baffling miseducation and lack of knowledge about the Holocaust amongst young people, the rise in anti-Semitic hate crimes, and the rise in teen suicides. I think cultural responses to these shifts come in waves. Hopefully as filmmakers we can feel them and respond.”
The Optimist opens on more than 700 screens nationwide starting Wednesday, March 11. Local venues and showtimes can be found at theoptimistmovie.com.•
Dennis Harvey is a member of the San Francisco Bay Area Film Critics Circle and a longtime correspondent for Variety. He's written for numerous other local and national outlets including 48 Hills, Fandor, L.A. Times, and the San Francisco Chronicle.
