“Aftermath”

Herman P. and Sophia Taubman Foundation Endowed Symposia in Jewish Studies at UCSB present,in commemoration of Yom Hashoah and as Holocaust Remembrance Week Inaugural Event:

The Santa Barbara premiere screening of Aftermath, winner of the Yad Vashem Chairman’s Award at this year’s Jerusalem Film Festival, will take place at 7:30 p.m. on Monday, April 28, 2014 at UCSB. The riveting story of two Polish brothers who try to come to terms with their village’s long hidden role in the Holocaust, Aftermath offers “a highly unsettling look at lingering prejudice and collective guilt” (New York Daily News). “A bombshell disguised as a thriller” (Los Angeles Times Film Critic Kenneth Turan), the film brilliantly “succeeds in bringing the past into the present” (J. Hoberman, The New York Times). This free, public event will serve to commemorate Yom HaShoah and to inaugurate Holocaust Remembrance Week at UCSB.

Franek and Jozek Kalina, sons of a poor farmer, are brothers from a small village in central Poland. Franek immigrated to the United States in the 80s and cut all ties with his family. Only when Jozek’s wife arrives in the US, without explanation, does Franek finally return to his homeland. Franek discovers that Jozek has been ostracized from the community and constantly receives threats. As Franek and Jozek struggle to rebuild their relationship, they are drawn into a gothic tale of intrigue. The two brothers eventually uncover a dark secret that forces them to confront the history of their family and their village.

Upon its release in Poland, Aftermath reignited the intense controversy that surrounded the publication, in 2000, of Neighbors by historian Jan T. Gross, a searing account of the covered-up slaughter in Jedwabne, a once half-Jewish village in northeastern Poland where hundreds of Jews, including children, were murdered in a savage pogrom in 1941. Polish nationals accused the film of being anti-Polish propaganda, as well as a distortion of a sensitive piece of Polish history, leading the film to be banned in some Polish cinemas.

The Herman P. and Sophia Taubman Foundation Endowed Symposia in Jewish Studies at UC Santa Barbara, a program of the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, is cosponsored by UCSB Arts and Lectures, Department of Religious Studies, Congregation B’nai B’rith, Jewish Federation of Greater Santa Barbara, and Santa Barbara Hillel.

hm 12/7/13; 4/15/14