“Among Neighbors” premieres at the 2024 Warsaw Jewish Film Festival
This November, the new film “Among Neighbors” premiered at the Warsaw Jewish Film Festival. The film was executive produced by Koret Board Co-President Dr. Anita Friedman.
Combining evocative hand-drawn animation with revelatory interviews and verité footage, “Among Neighbors” examines Jewish-Polish relations through the story of Gniewoszów, a small, rural town where Jews and Polish Catholics lived side by side for centuries. At its core, the film zeroes in on the last living Holocaust survivor from the town, and an aging eyewitness who saw Jews murdered there — not by Nazis, but by her own Polish neighbors.
Today, all signs of Jewish life in the small town of Gniewoszów have vanished — even the Jewish tombstones disappeared, having been stolen from the destroyed cemetery. Now, a lifetime after the Holocaust, award-winning American filmmaker Yoav Potash (“Crime After Crime,” Sundance Film Festival) unearths the deepest mysteries of this town, revealing both the love and the hatred that local Poles felt for their Jewish neighbors. The town’s oldest residents, in the twilight of their days, divulge secrets held their entire lives, and their stories come to life in stunning animated scenes, accented by artful touches of magical realism. Ultimately, their collective, heartfelt account lays bare the manner in which ordinary Polish townsfolk made life and death choices about their Jewish neighbors, with decisions that reflect both the very best and the very worst of human nature. As this history is now questioned and whitewashed in favor of a more “patriotic” and politically popular narrative, “Among Neighbors” shows how true patriotism means embracing the truth, no matter how painful it may be.
