Documentary Night: LOST TOWN

DIRECTED BY: Richard Goldgewicht, Jeremy Goldscheider

ABOUT:

Post-Film Q&A featuring LOST TOWN's historical consultant and subject, author Avrom Bendavid-Val

LOST TOWN is a documentary film that tells the story of Trochenbrod, the only all-Jewish town that ever endured outside of Palestine. The story unfolds as the film follows one man’s search to uncover the secrets of his father’s home town and bring together its descendants. Trochenbrod was first made famous by Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel, Everything is Illuminated. Though Foer's novel was fiction, its setting, Trochenbrod, was real—home to 5,000 Jews, virtually all of whom were slaughtered in the Holocaust. Not a trace of the once bustling town remains. Lost Town combines contemporary and archival footage and still photography, animation, survivor interviews, and original music to deliver a unique and moving historical and cinematic experience. -Seventh Art Releasing. 

AVROM BENDAVID-Val's book about the town of Trochenbrod and its people, The Heavens Are Empty: Discovering the Lost Town of Trochenbrod, was released by Pegasus Books in October 2010. The book is unique in the variety of first person accounts Bendavid-Val draws on, including those of Jews born in Trochenbrod as well as Ukrainians and Polish people who knew the town as children. His book is also unique in the large number of photographs and maps it contains. The Heavens Are Empty not only reveals the final days of this hidden town as witnessed by different people, but lets the reader experience the life and vibrancy that was Trochenbrod, and that was lost when Trochenbrod was lost. More about the book and the movie can be found at HeavensAreEmpty.com.

LANGUAGE: English, Hebrew, Ukrainian, Polish, and Portuguese with English subtitles

RATING: NR

RUNNING TIME: 85

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