“Still Life in Lodz” Film and Post Film Discussion with the filmmaker Slawomir Grünberg and Roni Ben Ari in conversation with Avi Ben Hur

Classrooms Without Borders, in partnership with Rodef Shalom Congregation, the Maltz Museum of Jewish Heritage, and The Ghettos Fighters’ House, is excited to offer the opportunity to watch the film “Still Life in Lodz” and engage in a post-film discussion with the filmmaker Slawomir Grünberg and Roni Ben Ari.
One Painting, a Century of Jewish Life
The lure of family mysteries lies at the heart of “Still Life in Lodz”, an emotionally riveting documentary that journeys to the historically tumultuous city of Lodz, Poland. Here, a surprise reunion with a painting that hung in the same apartment for 75 world-altering years becomes a probing investigation into the power of memory, art, time and resilience.

What follows is a deeply personal detective story rich with twists and turns. But, equally, the film is an ode to the lost generations of Jewish Lodz and a look at how fragile—but also how incredibly necessary—our relationship with the past is for creating the future.

The stirring mystery begins inside an ordinary-seeming tenement apartment where a painting has witnessed the most extraordinary of times. The painting is a serene still life. But it has clung to the wall through incredible personal and global turmoil— through both war and peace, through moments of joyous communion and shocking chaos, through everyday scenes of family love and the shattering terror of hate, displacement, the Holocaust and totalitarian rule.

Once, this painting was the constant companion to Lilka Elbaum, who grew up in Lodz and lived there until 1968, when at the age of 19, an antisemitic purge drove her and her entire family out of Poland. The portrait might have been a simple likeness of lush flowers and ripe fruit, but for Lilka, it had been an indelible connection to her childhood and to Lodz itself.

48 years later, by remarkable chance, Lilka has an emotional re-encounter with the painting in Lodz. This will spark a new journey full of startling new discoveries but also to a reckoning with the countless ghosts and complicated stories of the city. She brings two important companions on her trek, each with roots in Lodz from different eras, each searching for their own answers. New Yorker Paul Celler brings the perspective of a second-generation Holocaust survivor as he traces how his mother, against all odds, made it out of the Lodz Ghetto and Auschwitz. Exploring the pre-War life of Lodz is Israeli artist Roni Ben-Ari who is drawn back to the spot of her family’s textile workshop once located in Lilka’s same building. Together, the trio maps their own labyrinthine stories onto Lodz’s current landscape.

All of this comes to life through a mix of live moments, expressive original animation, authentic drawings and rare archival footage, which make the past as visceral and intimate as the present. The film is directed by Emmy Award winner Slawomir Grünberg (director and producer of more than 45 docs including the acclaimed KARSKI & THE LORDS OF HUMANITY). Himself a Jewish native of Lublin, Poland, Grünberg taps into a handmade style to get to the story’s innermost emotions and to mirror the intangible nature of memories. His unusual approach makes these unique accounts of Jewish perseverance fresh. Expansive as the story is, Grünberg zeroes in on the details: on the everyday mementos and artifacts that become the precious vessels where families store their most vital remembrances, and which so often are lasting clues to our life stories. As Lilka, Paul and Roni hunt for signs and symbols that can link them to their forebears, the film ponders how it is that mere inanimate objects—artworks, furniture, keepsakes, street corners, the very buildings we dwell within—are enchanted with feeling, meaning and connections to one another.

“Still Life in Lodz” also takes audiences deep into the once thriving Jewish community of Lodz. Jewish culture has been at the core of this once great center of textile manufacturing—still
filled with well-preserved factories, grand apartment buildings and industrial magnates’ palaces—since it came to the fore in the 19th century.

For a time, the city hosted Poland’s second largest Jewish population. Then, in 1939, German troops rolled into Lodz, annexing it to the Third Reich. Soon after, Nazis undertook an unthinkably inhumane plan: driving nearly 200,000 Jews into an overcrowded, 1.5 square-mile area that would become known as the Lodz Ghetto, sealing the people inside with barbed wire, leaving
them to fend for themselves amidst hunger, forced labor and deportations to concentration camps.

In 1944, the entire surviving population of Lodz Ghetto was “liquidated” to Auschwitz. Yet even mass catastrophe could not stop Lodz’s Jewish life. With an astonishing fortitude, thousands returned after the War—including Lilka’s parents, courageously saved by Polish Gentiles—determined to restart the community. Rising antisemitism would again shrink the population in the 50s and 60s, but there remains today a small but resolute Jewish community in the contemporary city, keeping the heritage going.

For Lilka, Paul and Roni, diving into the riddles and secrets of Lodz’s past brings new personal revelations. But it also opens a way forward. For they each believe that a brighter future can be built by truly honoring the voices that still speak from Lodz’s streets and walls…and from a painting that even in stillness was able to contain some of the vast beauty, wonders and sorrows of an entire century.

Slawomir Grünberg, Producer/Director
Photograph by Jerzy Maciej Koba

Slawomir Grünberg is an Emmy Award–winning documentary producer, director and cameraman. Born in Poland, he graduated from the Polish Film School in Lodz before emigrating to the United States in 1981.

He has since directed and produced over 45 documentary films spanning a broad range of topic and issues. In addition to Still Life In Lodz, they include Karski & The Lords of Humanity, Castaways, The Peretzniks, Portraits of Emotion, Coming Out In Poland, The Legacy of Jedwabne and Saved By Deportation.

Grünberg‘s acclaimed documentary School Prayer: A Community At War aired on PBS stations and garnered an Emmy Award. Among his awards, Grünberg has received the Guggenheim Fellowship, the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship and the Soros Justice Media Fellowship. His credits as director of photography include: Legacy, an Academy Award nominee for Best Documentary feature in 2001, and Sister Rose’s Passion, which won Best Short Doc at Tribeca Film Festival in 2004 and received an Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary Short in 2005.

An English edition of the book Sławomir Grünberg—A Man with the Camera by Barbara Grünberg, will be published in April of 2021.

Roni (Halpern) Ben Ari
Photograph by Jerzy Maciej Koba

Roni (Halpern) Ben Ari, an internationally acclaimed photographer, and a multimedia artist was born and lives in Israel. Her exhibition Loom|Father|Requiem was shown at the Central Museum of Textiles in Lodz and the Eretz Israel Museum in Tel Aviv. Her grandfather, Moshe Halpern, was a weaver of jacquard in pre-war Lodz and her father, Abraham Halpern, continued the family tradition in Israel. Roni sees herself as a weaver of memories from the looms’ DNA.

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