Ethel Rosenberg, la dernière danse
Blanche Finger
2003 - 51 min - Couleur et Noir & Blanc - France

14 July 1949 : the Soviet Union explodes its first atomic bomb. There has to be a culprit. On Friday 19 June 1953, before sundown, America, sick with McCarthyism, sacrifices the Rosenbergs on the altar of the cold war. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg are convicted of "atomic" espionage. Ethel, simply because she is Julius’s wife.
This documentary traces the life of Ethel Rosenberg, who dreamed with Julius of changing the world. Ethel was not a pasionaria of American Communism, nor was Ethel a spy. No doubt Ethel would have liked peacefully to take the social elevator of the America of the 1950s and get away for good from the miserable world of her childhood. Nothing definitive is known about what led her to resist the FBI and the terror of death. That mystery is the basis of this film.
On 5 December 2001, Ethel’s brother, David Greenglass, arrested at the same time as Julius, confesses on CBS that he lied when he denounced Ethel to the FBI and the prosecutor. Ethel was just a "lever" to force Julius to confess.