Frank Hertz (Hertzl) Wulfovich (born 1926, Ludza) - documentary film director and screenwriter, one of the most significant figures of Latvian and Soviet non-fiction cinema.
Hertz Frank was born into an educated and creative family: his father was a professional photographer-artist who in the 1930s organized a Jewish folk theatre in Ludza, while his mother, Roza Mayofis, was a physician from a rabbinical family. His maternal cousin, Israel Mayofis (1897–1930), was a humorist and translator who rendered works of Hayim Nahman Bialik and Ivan Krylov into Yiddish. Frank and his siblings were raised in a Zionist environment and were members of youth movements such as Hashomer Hatzair and Betar.
He completed a Hebrew-language Jewish school in Ludza, later studied at a yeshiva and a Latvian gymnasium, and during the war finished secondary education in Russia. He studied at the Kamyshlov Infantry School and simultaneously at the All-Union Correspondence Law Institute, graduating in 1947. Until 1952 he served in the Transbaikal Military District. After demobilization, he applied to the directing faculty of VGIK, successfully passed the creative competition, but was not admitted due to political circumstances related to his family. He then worked as a press photographer and as a photographer at the Riga Film Studio.
Frank began his career in cinema as a screenwriter. Among his early works were the films You and I (1963), Report of the Year (1965), and 235,000,000 (1967). International recognition came with the screenplay for White Bells (1963), a poetic story about a child’s experience of the city, blending documentary and fiction techniques; the film received diplomas at international film festivals in Oberhausen and San Francisco. In the mid-1960s he turned to directing. His early independent work Midday (1965) already revealed his distinctive artistic approach: the creation of a unified cinematic space and the feeling of time continuity.
A key work of his career, Without Legends (1967, with A. Brenč and A. Sazhin), challenged official narratives by portraying the complex reality behind a Soviet “hero” figure. Initially banned, the film later became part of the teaching program at VGIK. In 1973 Frank received the Grand Prix of the All-Union Film Festival in Alma-Ata and of the Oberhausen International Film Festival for The Trace of the Soul, a philosophical portrait of a man who embodied a humane vision of postwar life. His film The Joy of Being (1974), dedicated to the breeder Peteris Upitis, further developed his contemplative style, focusing on the organic flow of life.
His most famous work, Ten Minutes Older (1978), created together with cameraman Juris Podnieks, became a landmark of world documentary cinema. Filmed in a single unbroken shot, it presents the face of a child watching a puppet performance, turning the human face into a reflection of inner experience and of the surrounding world. In this work, Frank’s artistic method reached its fullest expression: rather than constructing meaning through montage, he revealed it through attentive observation of reality itself.
In a number of films, Herz Wulfovich Frank—trained as a lawyer—turned to the theme of crime and punishment. Among these works are Forbidden Zone (1975), Another’s Pain (1983), To the Dangerous Line (1984), The Supreme Court (1987), and Once There Lived Seven Simeons (1989). His film The Supreme Court, shot with cameraman Andris Seleckis and photographer Viktor Mikhailovsky, became one of the most widely discussed documentaries of its time. Seen by millions in the Soviet Union and abroad, it is built on conversations between the director and a man sentenced to death for murder. The film demonstrated Frank’s exceptional ability to enter into a human being’s inner world, to evoke empathy, and to provoke moral reflection. It was the first film in the Soviet Union to spark a broad public debate on the issue of capital punishment. The Supreme Court received numerous awards, including the “Golden Sesterce” at the Nyon International Film Festival in Switzerland (1987) and the main prize at the All-Union Film Festival in Sverdlovsk (1989).
A major milestone in Frank’s creative work was the feature-length documentary Once There Lived Seven Simeons, created together with director Vladimir Eisner. The film recounts the tragic story of the Ovechkin family from Irkutsk, who formed a family jazz ensemble and attempted to hijack an airplane to escape to the West; the attempt ended in a violent assault on the aircraft and the suicide of several family members. The film received the Grand Prix at the Leipzig Film Festival (1990), awards at the San Sebastián International Film Festival (1991), and a bronze prize in Yamagata (Japan, 1991), among others. In 1975 Frank was awarded the title of Honored Artist of Latvia and twice received the State Prize of Latvia (1967, 1989).
In 1988, at the invitation of the organizers of the Jerusalem Film Festival, Frank traveled to Israel with The Supreme Court as part of the first official Soviet cultural delegation after the break in diplomatic relations. This visit and his meetings with relatives—his sister, a former Prisoner of Zion, and his daughter—inspired him to write the screenplay Russia in Israel (1988), in which “Russia” was understood not as a geographical entity but as a cultural and historical space of Russian Jewry.
In 1989 he directed Song of Songs, a poetic reflection on love and the mystery of human birth. His film Jewish Street (1992), co-written with Leonid Koval and Alexander Getman, addressed the destruction of Latvian Jewry during the Holocaust; two of Frank’s sisters, deported from the Riga Ghetto, perished in the Stutthof concentration camp. The theme of the Holocaust had already appeared in his earlier films Testament (1963) and The Verdict (1966), where the emphasis was placed not on atrocity itself but on the moral strength of the victims.
In 1993 Frank moved to Israel and settled in Jerusalem. In 1998 he directed Ish ha-Kotel (“Man of the Western Wall”), together with S. Vinokur and Ya. Svirsky, a work he described as a “documentary mystery.” The film, посвящённый духовной силе Western Wall, premiered at the Jerusalem Film Festival (1998) and was later shown at the New York Jewish Film Festival (1999).
Frank created around thirty films and is considered one of the founders of the Latvian school of poetic documentary cinema. His central theme was the tragic dimension of human existence, yet his films are always imbued with hope and directed toward the search for human dignity and enduring values. He was also the author of more than one hundred publications on documentary cinema, the most important of which is his book The Ptolemy Map (1975), devoted to documentary film as an art form capable of achieving the depth of fiction. He served on the juries of numerous international film festivals and participated in educational programs at film schools in Augsburg, Moscow, and Tel Aviv.
His brother, Lev Frank (1920–1978), was a Doctor of Law and the founder of Soviet victimology, a field studying the problems of crime victims that developed in Western Europe after the Holocaust.
Family:
Wulf Frank – father
Roza Mayofis – mother
Lev Frank (1920–1978) - brother
Three sisters – names not specified