With God Against Man

In June 1940, Aristides de Sousa Mendes, the Portuguese Consul-General in Bordeaux, France, issued life saving visas to thousands of Holocaust refugees in defiance of his government's direct orders an action for which he paid a heavy personal price. In June 2013, filmmaker Semyon Pinkhasov followed a group of visa recipient families, along with members of the Sousa Mendes family, as they embarked on a pilgrimage retracing their families' footsteps of 73 years earlier. They were searching for Sousa Mendes, looking for traces and clues of a lost history in an effort to understand their personal pasts. Pinkhasov interweaves the testimonies of the "searchers" with compelling documentary footage and insights from experts to tell this little known story.