The Lincoln Theater, Damariscotta is showing the award winning 1993 film “Schindler's List” on Thursday, Jan. 3, at 7 p.m. and on Friday, Jan. 4 at 2 p.m. The film earned seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director, and this special presentation is part of The Lincoln Theater Classic Film Club series.

Following on our previous Coastal Senior College film discussion meet-ups, the Coastal Senior College Events Committee is holding a brown-bag lunch discussion of the film at the Midcoast Friends Meeting House, 77 Belvedere Road, Damariscotta on Monday, Jan. 7 from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. We invite you to see the film at the Lincoln Theater and then come to discuss it with us. Coffee, tea and juice will be provided. The brown-bag lunch discussion is free and open to the public.

Directed and co-produced by Steven Spielberg and written by Steven Zaillian, the film follows Oskar Schindler, a Sudeten German businessman, who saved the lives of more than a thousand mostly Polish-Jewish refugees from the Holocaust by employing them in his factories during World War II. It stars Liam Neeson as Schindler, Ralph Fiennes as SS officer Amon Göth, and Ben Kingsley as Schindler's Jewish accountant Itzhak Stern.

Lending a local perspective on the time and events of the film will be Hungarian born Paul Kando of Damariscotta, who will talk about his late father, then a government official, who worked with Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg saving Jews in Budapest.

When Schindler was smuggled into Budapest in a railway car full of Nazi newspapers as shown in the film, his revelations of Nazi atrocities and mass murder in the camps were of immense help in turning Budapest's "salon-anti-Semites" against Hitler. Kando believes the film portrays lessons that need to be learned and relearned by each successive generation.

On Jan. 27 at 12:30 p.m., the Lincoln Theater is also showing "Who Will Write Our History," as part of International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust, co-sponsored by the Holocaust and Human Rights center of Maine, https://hhrcmaine.org/ We will provide information about this during our brown-bag discussion.

For further information and suggestions for future films to see and discuss, contact Bruce Rockwood who is coordinating this event for Coastal Senior College at clan.rockwood@gmail.com. For further information on the film, see these three links:

http://www.lcct.org/cfc-presents-schindlers-list-r;-1993-maine-theater-ev1399.aspx,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schindler%27s_List,

https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-schindlers-list-1993