The last happy day

An experimental documentary portrait of Sandor Lenard, a Hungarian writer and medical doctor and a distant cousin of the filmmaker. In 1938 he arrived in Rome, fleeing the Nazis. There the U.S. Army Graves Registration Service hired Lenard to reconstruct the bones -- small and large -- of dead American soldiers. Eventually he found himself in remotest Brazil where he embarked on the translation of “Winnie the Pooh” into Latin, an eccentric task that catapulted him to brief world-wide fame. Sachs' essay film uses personal letters, abstracted war imagery, home movies, interviews, and a children's performance to create an intimate meditation on the destructive power of war.