"SHTTL" – film show

In the summer of 1941 young Mendele returns from Kyiv for a one-day visit to his Galician shtetl. No one suspects what catastrophe is about to unfold. It is one day before the Nazi invasion of the USSR.

• Sunday, 29 October, 2023 at 4 p.m., BUY A TICKET >>
• POLIN Museum's Auditorium

"SHTTL," dir. Ady Walter, Ukraine / France 2022, 114 min, drama – Polish premiere

Ukraine, June 21st, 1941. Mendele, a young film director from Kyiv, is on a visit to his shtetl not far from Sokal, Galicia. In the provincial town, where Soviets throw their way around and orthodox and secular residents are, as ever, at odds, many resent Mendele for having left. With only a few hours remaining until Sabbath, the boy needs to visit his father and his one-time bride-to-be Yuna, the latter soon to marry to his arch-rival Folye. All the while, German tanks lurk on the other side of the river... The movie, shot primarily in black and white and in Yiddish and Ukrainian, vividly describes an eastern European/Jewish world that no longer exists. To exemplify this gaping void, the filmmakers dropped the "E" from the film's title. The Ukrainian-French co-production involved the construction of an entire shtetl, inclusive of a consecrated synagogue which was to serve as a museum. And yet, in a very bitter irony of history, it was destroyed during the Russian invasion of Ukraine.