Written by Beate Antares Piotrowski,  the feature film, The Joy Division,  is going into Pre-Production with the start date of January 11, 2015.  The  Joy Division was developed from the short film of the same name that Beate directed and was featured at the Cannes Shorts Festival.   

 

 FOJ is proud to be a part of telling this story and will promote with PSAs and campaigns to support the end to sexual crimes against women. 

 

Logline:  When a young, defiant Polish resistance fighter is torn from her husband's arms and forced to serve in a secret concentration camp brothel run by the SS, she finds herself fighting for survival, love, and redemption.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

No aspect of holocaust history has been so secret as the forced prostitution of the female inmates who came to be known as the the  Joy Division. Sexual slavery has never been addressed in any judicial proceeding of SS crimes despite and estimated 34,000 plus female inmates having been forced to serve as prostitutes during the Third Reich’s reign of terror.

The story chronicles the capture of Izabela Iwanska, a young beautiful Polish resistance fighter forced to serve inside Block 24, Auschwitz’s secret brothel. Torn from her life and husband at gunpoint by the SS, Izabela is enslaved, coerced, and given empty promises of a release after six months. Inside the block, she finds herself engaged in a sinister game of survival and a personal journey for redemption. As she struggles with life in the brothel, she becomes increasingly more aware that her only form of escape is to manipulate the system into which she was forced.

The short film, The Joy Division, debuted at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival Shorts, and screened at the Nantucket and Cincinnati Film Festivals. In August 2011, the short film screened at both the LA Short Fest and the Gorge International Film Festival, and on October 16th, 2011 Joy Division was welcomed at the WGA for the Lady Filmmakers Film Festival.