A Roots Trip to Poland Delivers More than One Might have Expected

The Property (הנכס), billed as a film by the Modan sisters -- a debut film by Dana Modan, based on the graphic novel (published in 2013) by her sister, Rutu Modan -- is currently playing in movie theaters in Israel.

This is a charming film about modern-day Israeli Jews and their relationship to contemporary Poland and Poles.  The story revolves around two women – an aging grandmother, Regina, memorably played by the famous veteran actress Rivka Michaeli, and her granddaughter, Mika – who make a trip to Warsaw.  (The film is almost entirely shot abroad, either in Poland or in Georgia.)

Back in the 1930s, Regina, then a 15-year-old pregnant girl, was forced by her parents to quickly marry a Jewish boy and leave Warsaw for Palestine. Obviously, this saved her life.  Now, for the first time, she is returning to Poland, not so much to confront or explore her Polish roots, but rather to seek out the local boy who was her lover so long ago. 

The story revolves around a family apartment where Regina and her family lived, before the war.  Today, she discovers, the apartment functions as a small restaurant. But among the tables and chairs, Regina finds much more than she anticipated.  Meanwhile, Mika is tracking down a lawyer who might be able to help them in their attempt to regain possession of the apartment.  Along the way, she is befriended by a non-Jewish tour-guide who specializes in tours of the Ghetto. 

There are plentiful references to the Holocaust, but there are no scenes of terrible trauma.  The Holocaust references are contemporary ones – the Israeli high school kids who are so poorly behaved on the airplane on their way to Poland where they will visit lots of concentration camps; issues of how post-war Poland deals with properties that belonged to Jews; and maybe the best scene of all – a non-Jewish woman whose work entails rebuilding Jewish and Holocaust memory for tourism who exclaims “I just love the ghetto!”

There are hints of a possible Polish-Jewish Israeli reconciliation—it was possible for a Pole and a Jew to be in love once, it is possible again, and maybe the Polish people and the Jewish people can somehow learn to live together.

The Property is a film that includes a bit of romance, some nostalgia, a lot of humor and an array of quirky characters. It is highly recommended! Available from Go2Films.

  

A New TV Series about the High School Trips to Poland

Memory Forest, directed by Roman Shumunov, is a new prizewinning TV series, made for Israel TV Kan. The series tells the story of a journey to Poland of a group of Israeli high school students. 

The story is about 2 sets of friends – Shani and Lilush from Carmiel and Kobi and Omri from Herzliyah.  There is plenty of flirting between the girls and boys, and it seems that Shani is having trouble connecting to the subject matter and Omri seems to be a real jerk at the beginning.  But things even out, as we get to know them, and as their anxieties become clear.  Episode #1 is about Warsaw. Episode #2 takes place at Treblinka. Episode no. 3 is at Lublin and episode no. 4 is in the forest. 

I sit on the committee of the Film and Media Collaborative (made up of representatives of three funds: Gesher, Maimonides, and AviChai) which funded this series.  Honestly, we were all a bit apprehensive that the program might turn out to be too much of a teaching unit and also a bit formulaic.  I was thrilled to have a chance to preview the entire series this week and it was great!  The script, the acting, the historical teaching moments all were superb and I am proud to have been a small part of this project!

This series offers a mix between telling the story of the Shoah, on the one hand, and the experience as seen through the eyes of the young people, on the other.  There are many moving scenes, including the one at Treblinka, where we learn about the 17,000 stones in memory of the children and adults who were murdered there – every single day.  There is the nationalistic argument as seen through the expression of one boy who reacts with anger, saying that having ceremonies isn’t the only way to commemorate.  There are the moments when they are trying desperately to understand the meaning of the trip, the meaning of being survivors, the importance of how this trip reflects on their Jewishness, all so that the victims will not have died in vain.  There is the teenage girl who doesn’t want to spend any money in Poland because everyone there is anti-semitic but she is surprised to learn that Rivka, their accompanying survivor, wants to go take advantage of the shopping. We watch as these young people grow and slowly begin to understand so much about their own place within this story of memory.

Memory Forest is a TV series made up of 4 episodes, each approximately 30 minutes. 

A Film Unfinished

What is history and how does it enter our consciousness and become historical fact? Even documentary films are somewhat "staged", but to what extent does this enter our consciousness when we are viewing them? Our memory of the Holocaust is certainly through films, both drama and documentary, which have engraved on our minds a sort of cinematic memory of that time. But how can we know what is propaganda and what is reality?

Filmmaker Yael Hersonski has taken an otherwise unknown and unfinished Nazi propaganda film about the Warsaw Ghetto, and has created new layers of reality in order to help us remember. Her film, A Film Unfinished, which won a prize for best documentary at the Jerusalem Film Festival (July 2010), utilizes the partially edited, never completed film that she found in the archives of Germany, a propaganda film created by the Third Reich, shot in the Warsaw Ghetto during May 1942. In voice-over, she tells the viewer that "the cinematic deception was forgotten and the black-and-white images were engraved on memory as historical truth." This is the story of a propaganda film.

Hersonski combines the footage of the archival film with the story of the Warsaw Ghetto. We see so many faces, so many children, so much suffering. The sound-track includes readings from the daily diary entries of the head of the Judenrat and readings from the diaries of Ringelblum. In addition, she has interviewed survivors watching the footage, looking for people they knew, while their comments and impressions are used to help us identify what we are watching. There is also an interrogation protocol with the man behind the camera, who talks about what he saw and what he filmed, the contrasts and extremes of life in the ghetto – staged luxury versus actual poverty, hunger, dead bodies, and mass graves. There is even some footage shot in color by another cameraman for his own personal collection.

This was May 1942, 30 days of shooting, only two months before the beginning of the deportations to Treblinka.

A Film Unfinished is available from Go2Films and from Cinephil