Coming to NYC’s JCC CineMattersseries tonight, Tuesday October 1: LOST TOWN
Richard Goldgewicht and Jeremy Goldschieder’s look at an obsessive search for identity had its world premiere at Cleveland earlier this year. It has also screened at the Columbus Jewish film festival.
In 1942, a small Ukrainian town named Trochenbrod – the only exclusively Jewish community outside of Palestine – was wiped off the face of the Earth by the Nazis. It was birthplace to Avraham Bendavid-Val’s father, a mythological place no longer on any maps, and subsequently the source of endless fascination for Avraham, now seventy. Goldgewicht and Goldscheider’s film follows him in his painstaking attempt to resurrect Trochenbrod through interviews with its survivors and their families, animation and archival footage, visits to the long-cleared site, and the organization of a yearly gathering to pass on this accumulated knowledge. The story of Troichenbrod is fascinating, already brought to public awareness through Jonathan Safran Foer’s EVERYTHING IS ILLUMINATED, and some of the testimony provided is affecting. The doc’s main shortcoming is that it’s focused less on these survivors’ stories and more on the minutiae of Bendavid-Val’s quest, often superfluous details that drag the film down.
what (not) to doc 