What follows is a transcript of a Q&A with film director Shahar Rozen following a screening of Liebe Perla (1998) at the Tantur Ecumenical Institute on March 18, 2018. Rozen's documentary film centers on Perla Ovitz, who formerly went by the name Perla Ovici, a survivor of Mengele's experiments at Auschwitz-Birkenau, and her friend Hannelore Witkofski. Perla and her family, several of whom were born with dwarfism, had performed prior to the war as entertainers under the name the Lilliput Troupe. They specialized in music and comedy routines and performed in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Romania until they were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944. After the liberation of the camp, the Ovici family went to the Soviet Union and later to Antwerp. In May 1949 they immigrated to Israel, eventually settling in Haifa. Rozen's documentary Liebe Perla was produced by Edna Kowarsky and distributed by Film Platform.

Brad Prager: You mentioned that you knew Perla before you began filming, and I would like to ask you to say a little bit about how you came to this story and to the idea for the film.

Shahar Rozen: I studied at film school in Jerusalem, not far from here, and I served in the army on that nearby mountain, where there is now a huge wall between Bethlehem and Jerusalem. When I was in my first year of film school, we were given an assignment to make a short documentary about a subject rather than about a person. Being not so tall myself, I decided to make a documentary about the subject of short people, what it means to be short, and how they deal with the world. It was a topic that interested me, and Werner Herzog had made a film about this. My mother’s family was from Haifa, and they remembered Perla's family because in Haifa her family had owned a cinema, so many people knew them. I found the phone number and went to visit them. I remember climbing the stairs and seeing the door, and it was the first time I saw a door where the peepholes were at the top and bottom of the door. All the other short people I met until that day had “normal” houses. When I entered Perla’s home, she was still living with her sister Elizabeth. The family had normal furniture and small furniture: the curtains, the decor—it was amazing.