SHORT TAKES / MOVIES : Documentarians Defend ‘Liberators’

Criticism of a film about black GIs who liberated Jews from concentration camps has been escalating in recently weeks, especially on the East Coast, where veterans, reporters and Jewish groups have been raising questions about its accuracy.

Yet the film, “Liberators: Fighting on Two Fronts in World War II,” was nominated for an Oscar Wednesday.

Produced by Nina Rosenblum and Bill Miles in association with Thirteen/WNET for “The American Experience,” the 90-minute documentary has been attacked for allegedly exaggerating the role that black soldiers played in the liberation of Dachau and Buchenwald. PBS, which broadcast the film last November, has withdrawn it from further airings pending a review of the charges.

However, the documentary community remains solidly behind “Liberators.”

“I think this film is basically accurate,” said Jon Wilkman, president of the 1,300-member International Documentary Assn., which honored the film last fall. Accusing the film’s critics of focusing on minutiae, he acknowledged that small, insignificant errors may have crept in to the documentary. “Often films like this have a strong emotional content, and in some instances the emotional content may have blurred some of the facts.”

Miles and Rosenblum were showing their film at the Berlin Film Festival when the Oscar nominations were announced. But in the documentary association’s current newsletter, they defend “Liberators” and suggest that their critics may want to undermine Jesse Jackson’s recent efforts to improve relations between Jews and blacks.

“Significantly, these attacks began not after the film was aired (to favorable reviews) on PBS this past November, nor after the companion book was published, but only after the Rev. Jesse Jackson publicly praised the film, adding that he hoped it would be seen by every American schoolchild,” the filmmakers state.