Gold Coast International Film Festival Presents PORTRAIT OF WALLY, Today

TONIGHT, Thursday, May 30, 2013, The Gold Coast International Film Festival is honored to present a screening of the film Portrait of Wally at Great Neck Arts Center, 113 Middle Neck Road, Great Neck (entrance off Maple Drive). The evening, which is being produced by the Gold Coast International Film Festival and Gold Coast Arts Center (formerly known as the Great Neck Arts Center) in conjunction with the Town of North Hempstead and the Holocaust Memorial & Tolerance Center of Nassau County and is sponsored by the Claire Friedlander Family Foundation, will feature a reception at 6:30pm, film at 7:30 PM followed by a Q&A sessionwith Historian and Author Willi Korte after the film.

"Portrait of Wally", Egon Schiele's tender picture of his mistress, Walburga ("Wally") Neuzil, is the pride of the Leopold Museum in Vienna. But for 13 years the painting was locked up in New York, caught in a legal battle between the Austrian museum and the Jewish family from whom the Nazis seized the painting in 1939. The film PORTRAIT OF WALLY traces the history of this iconic image - from Schiele's gesture of affection toward his young lover, to the theft of the painting from Lea Bondi, a Jewish art dealer fleeing Vienna for her life, to the post-war confusion and subterfuge that evoke THE THIRD MAN, to the surprise resurfacing of "Wally" on loan to the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan in 1997.

"We are honored to bring such an important, gripping film to the Gold Coast audience" remarked Regina Gil, Executive Director of the Gold Coast Arts Center and Founder of the Gold Coast International Film Festival.

The "Wally" case brought the story of Nazi art loot into the open, eventually forcing museums in Europe and the U.S. to search their own collections for suspect objects. Many museums ended up returning art to Jewish families who had abandoned hope until "Wally" showed that institutions could be held accountable for holding property stolen during the Holocaust. The case was resolved in dramatic fashion in the summer of 2010, but only after the history of Schiele's extraordinary painting was unearthed to revisit the crimes of the Holocaust and to witness the reluctance of major institutions in Europe and New York to send the "last prisoners of war" back to their families.

Guest speaker Willi Korte is a German-born jurist, historian, researcher, and author who studied history, law and politics at the Free University of Berlin, as well as at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich and at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. He holds a law degree and a Ph. D. in history. He has spent the past twenty years on matters related to the identification and restitution of works and objects of art looted by the Nazis and their collaborators. As one of the foremost historical investigators and researchers in the field of cultural assets misappropriated and looted between 1933 and 1945, Dr. Korte relies heavily on his special knowledge of private and public archives in North America and Europe. One of his earliest accomplishments was the location and return of the famous Quedlinburg treasure to its rightful owners in Germany. He provided the historical research and background in regard to Egon Schiele's "Portrait of Wally" and has been responsible for many restitutions of Old Masters belonging to the late Max Stern, the Jewish art dealer in Düsseldorf, Germany, who fled to Canada in the late 1930s. Dr. Korte is co-author of Quedlinburg-Texas und zurück: Schwarzhandel mit geraubter Kunst (1994), and a founder of the Holocaust Art Restitution Project (HARP).

The Gold Coast International Film Festival celebrates the rich culture, history and talent of this fabled region. The "Gold Coast" was once a haven for New York's elite such as the Pratts, Whitneys, Roosevelts, Fricks, Guests, DuPonts, J.P. Morgan, and Otto Kahn, and today their mansions exist as museums, historic spots and party spaces. Great Neck (the hub of the Festival) was home to many celebrities including Groucho Marx, Joan Crawford, Paulette Goddard, Charlie Chaplin, W.C. Fields, George M. Cohan and other giants of the silver screen. In fact, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote The Great Gatsby here. Today's Gold Coast remains a confluence of culture and class. Those influences from our past combined with the artistry, storytelling and technology of today's world, enable the Gold Coast International Film Festival to present our audiences with a unique and accessible festival experience. Everyone's invited!

Tickets are $20 which includes a reception at 6:30pm, the screening at 7:30pm and the Q&A session with Willi Korte after the film ends. To purchase, please visit goldcoastfilmfestival.org or call (516) 829-2570.

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