This is definitely a different Holocaust film than any other I’ve seen because the narrative stays in present tense. Behind the scenes, were you looking at archival photos, documents, and footage of these cities from the World War II era?
JE: No. Except that we were kind of inundated with it unexpectedly, because shooting around Lublin actually offered all sorts of history. It started coming out of the walls for us. There’s a scene where the two characters are walking above this really long mural that’s been painted on a canal. And the mural is of Jewish life from 150 years ago. It’s unbelievably detailed and evocative and specific. And we just found that while we were scouting around Lublin. So we did start to find stuff that was kind of unexpected, but in terms of linking this movie visually to older versions of Poland, that wasn’t ever the kind of rubric we used.
MD: It was variation. We tried to find frames of places that don’t exist anymore. We wanted to crash reality with the past.
JE: Oh, that’s right.
MD: We were trying to investigate and find the places where we heard something used to be—like this shoe shop or the workshop of someone, that’s not there anymore and now it’s, let’s say, a parking lot. And we decided to shoot this parking lot because from our investigation, it used to be another place [of Jewish life] and we wanted to play with that. And in terms of sequencing Warsaw, our characters were traveling along the old wall of the Warsaw ghetto—this wall divided Warsaw and the ghetto.
JE: Yeah, we were really specifically trying to find places that in a single frame could illustrate the history of Poland. So there’s this street in Warsaw called Waliców Street, which has these unusually modern apartment buildings built atop the facade of a building that had been destroyed in World War II, but not crumbled. And it’s across the street from a building that was like a crumbling facade. So actually there was a motif that we were going for, which was to try to show the history in a single image.
