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Haunting and unforgettable, the new documentary from filmmaker Nick Davis brings forward rare testimonies and never before seen archival footage to explore the lives of non-Jewish rescuers during the Holocaust. In this conversation with VENTS, Davis explains what drew him to these untold stories, how the film grew into a major feature, and why the questions at its core still matter.Their choices, made under real danger, echo sharply today.
Directed by Davis and narrated by an extraordinary cast that includes Helen Mirren, Jeremy Irons, Ellen Burstyn, F. Murray Abraham, Lily Tomlin, and many others, the film pushes viewers toward the same question its subjects once faced: What would I have done? This Ordinary Thing opened December 5 at The Cinema Village in New York, with a VOD release across major platforms coming March 31, 2026.
VENTS: So, what first pulled you toward the untold stories of non-Jewish rescuers, and when did you know this needed to be a feature documentary rather than a smaller project?
Nick Davis: Well, those are great questions. I think when the idea first dropped in my lap, and it was plopped there by the executive producer, Al Tapper, who I’d worked with before, I sort of thought, how can you not do this? How can you not tell a story about these people who acted in such a way to underscore the essential sameness of all human beings? Like, these were people who just did what they thought was the right thing to do. They didn’t think of themselves as heroes. They just, you know, knock on the door, to his friend, to our amazement, he was a Jew. And so, of course, I’ll help you.
And so I just felt like in this time where everything is encouraging us to pick a side and placing us into the red team or the green team, and the divisions are so stark and the tribalism is so intense, it just seemed like a project that talked about our shared humanity was really worth doing.
Initially, we went back and forth, is it a short, less than 40 minutes or so? And I think we just felt like this story is going to take the length of time it needs. Because there’s no central character. I mean, it’s the essential character of all of these people that is the main character. I thought, well, maybe it’s just a short.
And then the Cast Came In
Nick Davis: [Then] we started to get these real actors. I started the film in May of 2022, and for a long time I was working with the voices that had been supplied to me by my friends and friends of friends and people who like to read. My wife and partner in the company, Series of Dreams, was always saying, yeah, okay, when are you going to get real actors? When are you going to try and get real actors?
For whatever reason, it took a long time before I finally realized like, yeah, this is a real thing. Maybe let’s try. You never know. And so we sent out requests through agents. And for months, nothing happened. And then one day, out of the blue, you get the phone call that says Dame Helen Mirren wants to be in your film. It was mind blowing. And also earth shattering in terms of the film, because once she said yes, that permits all these other people to say, well, if she’s going to be in it, I’ll be in this thing.
Within two or three weeks, we had an extraordinary cast. It ended up being five Academy Award winners and all these nominations. But it goes beyond awards. They’re also just great actors. And it elevated the thing and made it so much more immediate and real. That’s what you’re always trying to do as a filmmaker with a historical film. You want history to feel alive. You want to feel like this is current. It’s happening. It’s relevant. Nothing happened in black and white. The Holocaust and World War Two were not in black and white, they were in color. I wanted as much color footage as we could find to make the viewer feel like this is a powerful, relevant story and force the viewer, I hope, to think, I wonder what I would do if there was a knock on my door.
VENTS: And the film uses never before seen archival footage. So what was the most surprising and or unsettling discovery during that research process?
Nick Davis: In terms of the footage, we had these great archival producers, Robbie Schindler and Hilary Dann. And Josh Freed, who edited the film, also found some wonderful stuff online. There were so many. It’s a film about ordinary people, so I wanted ordinary footage. People swimming in a lake in Germany in the 30s, people riding their motorcycles and sipping tea at a cafe, including German soldiers. All of it just feeling like, yeah, okay, this is really happening.
The most unsettling piece of footage is a German soldier during the war who is clowning around, hopping up and down on his knees like he’s some sort of children’s toy. And you can sort of see, he’s just a young German guy. And he’s wearing a soldier’s outfit. And he probably did all kinds of heinous, murderous things as people do in war. But he’s just a human being. And that’s what you want. You want to feel like this is horrifying, but also we’re here for such a short time. It drives me crazy sometimes that people put us into these categories as if we’re not all the same.
Humanity, Danger, and Everyday Choices
VENTS: A lot of people don’t realize that people who are fascist or fascist adjacent can be little old ladies or someone like that, not always somebody in a Nazi uniform.
Nick Davis: That’s right. There’s footage we use as a character voiced by Kelly O’Hara says, you know, we had to be really careful with our housekeeper, Lisa, because she didn’t like us. And you could get $100 for turning in a Jew. And we have footage of someone on the street. And you realize, yeah, that person’s human too. And she wants the hundred dollars. So she might just turn you in. They’re powerful stories.
VENTS: And you mentioned that few, if any, of the subjects saw themselves as heroes. So how did that humility shape the tone and the structure of this documentary?
Nick Davis: It came through in everything they said. All of the things they said were imbued with the everyday, the quotidian tasks of life. There’s a great story voiced by Ellen Burstyn where the Jews this woman’s mother was hiding wanted to do something. So they were darning the socks and doing the chores mama didn’t want to do. Ordinary life can be really stressful and hard. You just want to feel like people are doing what they can to get by. That’s the goal of the film anyway.
The Moral Question
VENTS: The moral question, what would I have done, is at the heart of this film. How did you work to make that feel real and not just theoretical?
Nick Davis: I think it’s in all of these stories. You just can’t watch them without asking, what would you do? F. Murray Abraham voices one where he and his wife talk it over and ask what they should do. And he says, I don’t know how I would feel if we later learned that this person was killed. I would be destroyed myself. So he had to confront the fact that he would feel awful if he didn’t help. Lots of times it’s easy not to think about these kinds of things. But that can warp you and force you into all kinds of bad behavior also.
VENTS: You weave so many different testimonies into distinct yet unified narrative threads. Were there any hard editorial choices you had to make? Any deleted scenes?
Nick Davis: Oh yeah. There are great bits all over the editing room floor metaphorically. You just felt like, we’ve made this point and you don’t need to make it again. As great as F. Murray Abraham saying they’ll kill us for one so we may as well take the second, Jeremy Irons is saying it and we need him to say it for all these other reasons. So you can’t have them both. If you have them both, you feel like you’re not making progress. You want to always feel like we’re moving forward.
There’s a story here that is the evolution of the idea. This is coming, we better do something. All right, now we’re going to do something. Oh, this is dangerous. This is stressful and hard. Oh, it’s over. Oh my God, we don’t seem to have learned the lesson. Would we do it again? Probably.
Parallels Without Preaching
VENTS: Given today’s political and social climate, what contemporary parallels did you feel were important to underline without becoming too didactic?
Nick Davis: What was wonderful is there’s no narrator, or there are 45 narrators, but there’s no voice of God. These interviews were all conducted in the 1980s. So these people are speaking to you and saying we don’t seem to have learned the lesson. We’re still dividing ourselves. If we couldn’t learn from World War II, will we ever learn?
We’re making the film in 2023, 2024, 2025. So what should we show? We need to show some division. We’re not going to show division from the 1980s. We’re going to show division from now. So while they’re talking in the 1980s, you see current images. It’s up to the viewer to think, hey, this is relevant in this way or that way. Ultimately this is a historical film about that group of people in that time and place.
What Younger Audiences Can Take Away
VENTS: What do you hope younger audiences who feel distant from World War II take from these accounts of people whose compassion was chosen over conformity?
Nick Davis: Well, that’s what I hope I did. You said it, Wade. That’s what I hope they take. We also wanted to be clear by beginning the film with text on screen that lays out the facts. The further away we get from the Holocaust, the more likely it is that we will forget it or not know the basic facts. You see these polls of people who don’t know who won the Civil War or whatever it is. It’s horrifying. So we say, here are the facts and here are these stories. What do you think? How would you behave if these things were happening now?
The hope is that people will consider their everyday lives and consider what they can do to help dissolve a little bit of the boundaries that are constantly being erected to divide us all into the blue team and the red team and the green team. It’s silly.
VENTS: I’ve always felt it strange that the same people who hate Jews are the same ones who deny the Holocaust happened.
Nick Davis: Yeah. I saw somebody the other day say something like, it’s not just that those who don’t know the past are condemned to repeat it. It’s those who don’t want us to learn history who want to repeat it. I thought that was an interesting way of looking at it.
