Scene: a teenage neo-Nazi trails a Jewish boy out of a New York subway station and attacks him, screaming with rage.
Flashback: the attacker, wearing a yarmulke, challenges his rabbi on points of theology.
The Believer, a film written and directed by Henry Bean, MA '74, hauls viewers inside the mind of a tortured anti-Semite who was born and raised Jewish. A brutal, squirm-in-your-seat movie, it won the Grand Jury Prize at this year's Sundance Film Festival.
Bean, a screenwriter whose credits include Internal Affairs and Desperate Measures, based the film on a true story of a Ku Klux Klan member who killed himself in 1964, two hours after a New York Times story hit the streets revealing his Jewish past.
Critics at Sundance loved The Believer, Bean's directorial debut. New York Times reviewer Elvis Mitchell described it as "a volatile, edgy picture that has audiences divided and talking."
Although the film's provocative theme scared off some potential distributors, Bean--who has signed on as a writer for the upcoming Basic Instinct 2--is confident Believer will find a wider audience. "This film will get distribution," he told Entertainment Weekly in March.
