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The director goes back to Poland, the land of her childhood, to meet the people her late father lived with before they were forced out in ‘68.

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Poland 1968. A cabaret-style film documenting the last hours in Poland of Jews driven out by a wave of anti- Semitism.

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In the spring of 1945, Polish Jewish Holocaust survivor Lena Kuchlar a young teacher and physiologist, discovered dozens of orphaned Jewish children (ages 3-15) holed up the Jewish Committee Center in Krakow. Inspired by the teachings of Janusz Korczak and employing progressive psychiatric methods, she slowly brought these damaged children back to life. The orphanage she established in Zakopane, Poland, fell pray to antisemitic attacks and in 1949 she smuggled the children out of Poland, first to France and eventually to Israel, to Schiller Kibbutz. My 100 Children is based on Kuchlar’s best selling, watershed 1959 autobiography. The book was translated into fourteen languages and Kuchlar became a minor celebrity in Israel, appearing on television and throughout the country.

My 100 Children includes moving interviews with Kuchlar’s own daughter and many of Kuchlar’s “children” who recall the dramatic events.

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This Israeli documentary opens old wounds in the remote Lithuanian village of Polnar, where over 100,000 – mainly Jews – were murdered by the Nazis during WWII. We listen to testimonies from ageing witnesses who everyday lived with the sound of the executioner’s gunfire and the stench of rotting bodies in nearby pits. The more we hear, the more the lines of passivity and responsibility blur as we learn of the villagers’ often cold response to the nearby slaughter. However, some of the most moving memories come from those who actually escaped death by a whisker, sometimes surviving for hours, if not days, in a hellish pile of their dead and rotting relatives and comrades. 

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Krajinka, aka “Landscape,” consists of 10 separate vignettes, or short stories, grafted together chronologically. The time span stretches from pre-WWII Czechoslovakia to the latter half of the 20th century. Although a couple of characters reappear in episodes, the stories are mainly independent of each other.

What unites the stories is a rural spirit of life that is ribald, compassionate, cruel, and above all resilient. The “landscape” shrugs off Fascists (both Hungarian and German), and subsequent Communists. Still, there is a feeling that we are witnessing the end of an era, the gradual demise of a way of life that will never come again. The movie is a eulogy for this dying culture.

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Yariv manages to organize a unique archaeological excavation to unearth the treasure. But as the digging progresses, it becomes apparent that the synagogue’s soil conceals a 60-year-old sinister secret and Yariv and his crew begin to lose hope.

Until one morning a shovel hits a metallic object in one of the ditches…

The search and excavation for the treasure translates within the film to a succession of poignant metaphors – to the Jewish existence in Poland and its annihilation, to the possibility of a dialog between the younger generations and above all – to the growing sentiment that only 60 years have gone by and already WW2 and it’s greatest nightmare – the Holocaust – is tragically transforming into an archaeological exhibit…

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An Israeli games inventor returns to his childhood neighbourhood in the Netherlands to reunite with his and Anne Frank’s former classmates, only to discover a confusing truth about his own hiding place in World War Two

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Poland, the mid 1960s. A struggling family in an impoverished neighborhood. The mother, separated from her Polish husband, spends most of her time at work in order to provide the basic needs for her twelve and fifteen-year-old sons. The boys have joined a gang with strong neo-Nazi orientations. One day, the gang enters a Jewish neighborhood, vandalizing the premises and stabbing some youngsters, until they are arrested by the police. Due to this incident, their mother decides to tell them the truth – she is a Jew who survived the Holocaust and raised them in the Catholic faith. She informs them that they are going to immigrate to Australia, while in truth, they are moving to Israel.

The film explores the struggles for self-identity as immigrants, while trying to build a new life in a foreign land.

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