Michigan screenwriter-producer Roger Rapoport will be at Berkeley’s Hillside Club on Tuesday for the California premiere of his World War II-era film “Old Heart,” a drama about a mixed-race couple involved in espionage based on the award-winning novel of the same name by Peter Ferry.
Screening in a benefit for Bay City News and Local News Matters, the movie tells the story of U.S. Army private Tom Johnson, a Black man who joins Dutch Jewish translator Sarah van Praag on an operation to smuggle food to starving people suffering under the Nazis in the Netherlands during 1944-45’s Hunger Winter.
But their romance ends after the war, and 60 years later, 85-year-old Tom, whose family wants to place him in assisted living, disappears on a plane to Amsterdam, determined to reconnect with his long-lost love.
At the movie’s world premiere in Detroit last month, Rapaport said, “The very enthusiastic audience actually cheered when Tom Johnson won his immigration case, the high point of the film.”
Directed by Kirk Wahamaki and Leslye Witt and filmed in the Netherlands and Michigan, “Old Heart” stars Edward Gaines as Old Tom, Jamelle Sargent as Young Tom, Eva Doueiri as Sarah and Diane Van Wesep as Pim de Wit.
Rapoport, who also penned the play “Old Heart,” which premiered in Michigan in 2022, calls the film a “tribute to elder independence.”
At Tuesday’s benefit, Rapoport will answer questions and tell the story behind the story of, he says, “how America fought the world’s greatest racist with a segregated Army.”
“Old Heart” screens at 7 p.m. June 17 at The Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar St., Berkeley. Tickets are $12.50-$18 at hillsideclub.org.
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