Shttl

North American Premiere

Winner of the Audience Award at the Rome Film Festival and undoubtedly one of the most spellbinding films of the year, Shttl beautifully recreates and captures the life and loves of a Yiddish-speaking shtetl on the eve of the Nazi invasion of Soviet Ukraine. On a long, fading summer evening, a young man returns to his shtetl, which he learns is preparing for a wedding. To pursue a secular life in Kyiv, the young man had left behind friends, family, and the woman he loves, but has now been drawn back to the familiar and comforting world of the shtetl. Unraveling the simmering tensions between tradition and modernity, director Ady Walter’s debut masterpiece, made in the Ukraine, is captured in one extraordinary long shot, as it stunningly reconstructs a world on the precipice of disaster. Filmed in Yiddish and featuring powerful performances from Moshe Lobel, Saul Rubinek and Anisia Stasevich, Shttl is a hypnotic masterpiece and an extraordinary recreation of an almost forgotten world. The film’s title is a twist on “shtetl,” the Yiddish word for village, but with the letter “e” dropped from the title in an ode to “La Disparition,” a 1969 novel by Georges Perec, whose mother died in Auschwitz. In it, the letter never appears, its absence marking a vacuum, an empty space, a gaping hole, where once a world existed.