FILM REVIEW: Ady Walter’s ‘SHTTL’

Innumerable films have covered the Holocaust, and there have been infinite ways of filming its horrors. For example, Roman Polanski’s great “The Pianist” offers solidity, intelligence, and gravity in his most personal, most constrained, and arguably least perverse film about a pianist who survives the Holocaust in Warsaw—more by luck than by any act of heroism. The film vividly contrasts with the extremely popular, much lauded “Schindler’s List,” a film which demonstrates Steven Spielberg’s skill at constructing a classical narrative and his genius for moving an audience. And is a much more emotionally heightened and dramatic film than Polanski’s. Spielberg also tends to indulge at moments in kitsch and attempts to mute the dread of the Holocaust by centering on a flawed gentile hero and Jewish survivors.

A new film, “SHTTL,” (the missing “e” is meant to represent the absence brought about by the Holocaust) offers a fresh take on the Holocaust, depicting the Jewish Eastern European world on the day it began to be destroyed. Directed by a first-time feature director, Ady Walter, the film authentically reconstructs a shtetl—a marketplace, a synagogue, and mikvah—in rural Ukraine six months before the recent Russian invasion. Its central figure is Mendele (Moshe Lobel), an aspiring filmmaker who left the shetl and the yeshiva for Kiev two years before to join the Red Army. He returns home so he can run away with his love, Yuna (Anisia Stasevich), who is the daughter of the village’s Rebbe. Their romance is complicated by the fact that Yuna is engaged to marry Mendele’s aspiring rabbi nemesis, Folie (Antoine Millet), a rigid, mean-spirited Hasid, who represents the worst of traditional religiosity.

The film takes place on a single day and is ambitious and formally adventurous. The dialogue is totally in Yiddish, and it is filmed in a single shot as the camera pans and tracks around the shtetl observing different debates and conversations. It even provides flashbacks in color without losing continuity when returning to black and white.

The world the film evokes is a roiling one with the Soviets occupying the village while internal debates and controversies rage between Hasidim, Communists, and Zionists—even feminism is incongruously argued in the film.

Mendele had been a star yeshiva student, who, though ostensibly rejecting the orthodox religious tradition, has never totally severed his emotional link to the community and to the past. Consequently, he lingers in the shtetl, mediating disputes and remembering that his mother said (she who became an outsider) that she would always be with him.

The film neither romanticizes nor sentimentalizes the shtetl, which has often occurred in films. And it does not take an ideological side in the internecine conflicts. What Mendele sees is that unity is the only answer and that faith is insufficient. The film sometimes feels didactic—too many arguments that stop the drama in its tracks and a tendency to create self-consciously idiosyncratic minor characters. However, SHTTL is an inspired film.