The Believer

A highly charged drama centering on a Jewish Nazi and based upon a real-life tale, this film by Henry Bean looks at young Danny Balint (Ryan Gosling), a former yeshiva student with a thorough knowledge of the Torah who is first seen as an angry skinhead roaming the streets of New York City. Danny has found allies in the home of Lina Moebius (Theresa Russell), where fascist leader Curtis Zampf (Billy Zane) has been speaking, and he begins to become part of their circle, including romancing Lina's troubled daughter Carla (Summer Phoenix). After a fight in a kosher deli, Danny and his skinhead pals are sentenced to sensitivity sessions with elderly Holocaust survivors, and though Danny is angered by their passivity, their stories haunt him. When the bombing of a synagogue is proposed, Danny is shocked to learn that he cares somewhat for this history that he has been ignoring. Living a more peaceful Jewish existence by day and a hate-fueled skinhead life at night, Danny is conflicted by his upbringing and the desire to question it. The Believer was the Grand Jury Prize winner at the 2001 Sundance Film Festival.