Film about Israeli ‘Walt Disney’ lends urgency to save Joseph Bau museum

Clila and Hadassah Bau, daughters of illustrator, animator and Holocaust survivor Joseph Bau, have been battling for years to save their father’s Tel Aviv art studio-turned-museum, which is slated for demolition.

Now they’re hoping that a film, “Bau: Artist at War,” will lend more awareness and urgency to their mission.

The 130-minute film (2024) starring Emile Hirsch and Inbar Lavi is a fictionalized version of Bau’s saga, which includes his survival in the Plaszów concentration camp, his marriage to Rebecca Tannenbaum in the camp, and his lucky turn in becoming a Schindler’s List Jew.

It was written by an evangelical Christian and directed by a Hollywood native, Sean McNamara.

“Bau: Artist at War” is being screened at 1 p.m. on February 28 at the Tel Aviv Cinematheque and will be shown elsewhere.

Clila Bau noted that it took several rewrites to get the script right, as the sisters insisted on the presence of humor in the film, a characteristic that saved their father and their family.

“We kept passing over scripts, because humor is how our father survived the war; he did everything with humor,” said Clila Bau.

The movie’s scriptwriter, Deborah Smerecnik, was visiting Israel on a mission in 2009 when she first met the Baus and heard their story.

Clila Bau said that her parents’ story of survival had a lasting effect on Smerecnik, who ended up studying scriptwriting, directing and production as a result of her involvement in “Bau: Artist at War.”

“She made the movie to save the museum,” said Bau.

When McNamara entered the project, said Bau, he visited the museum, “this big man with a huge heart, and his eyes widened at what he was seeing,” she said. “He took Dad’s drawings, and you see them in the film; they’re the main actors in the movie.”

It was in the late 1990s that Joseph Bau, known as the Israeli “Walt Disney,” had the idea of turning his two-room, high-ceilinged Tel Aviv studio into a museum, showing his original paintings, illustrations, animations and top-secret forgeries for the Mossad.

When he died in 2002, the museum was already up and running. Since that time, his daughters have managed the space and their family story for tourists and visitors.

The building, located off Tel Aviv’s Rothschild Boulevard, is set for demolition, and the sisters want to relocate the museum.

They launched a crowdfunding campaign to raise $200,000 for a professional feasibility study with a leading museum planning firm in order to find a new home and create a long-term plan.

“We believe in miracles,” said Hadassah Bau, who, along with her sister, often mentions the wonders of their parents’ survival in Plaszów, their mother’s survival in Auschwitz, and their parents’ miraculous reunion after the war.