WinterFest Feb. 25-26, 2023 San Francisco (Jewish Film Institute)

[Chris Knipp]

SHTTL (Ady Walter 2022)

Some see this as an elegiac, Shoah piece: We who are about to die pose in all our colorful and tragic variety for you. But it's full of lively conflict. Its protagonist is a young Jewish filmmaker, Mendele, who returns from two years in Kiev, to find his aging father considers him a "luftmensch," a useless dreamer - who should have stayed and studied the Talmud. The single-shot technique indeed works lyrically and thus elegiacally, but also has the mark of a stunt by now. It gives the film the quality of a guided tour, a mockup of tableaux. Which it is, given that its sets, as is revealed in a making-of in Deadline, will be kept up as an open air exhibition to show what the prewar Jewish ghatto-towns were like. The film as it unreels, while lively and informative, and argumentative and talky, also feels stagey and self-conscious. Nora Lee Mandel writes in Maven's Nest: "Debut French director Ady Walter brilliantly immerses the audience into what was once Galicia" (now Ukraine) "on June 21, 1941. The camera walks through a vivid crowd of pressures and antagonisms" (which she meticulously lists) "not usually seen in more typical schmaltzy remembrances of such shtetls." Yes, and this is a successful work of archeology: but for all the antagonisms, there is no overriding dramatic conflict to make this an exciting film. Nonetheless, Jews and non-Jews alike would do well to learn about the Russian shtetls, because from their populations derive most of America's Ashkenazi Jews, who have been identified as the genetic strain with the world's statistically highest IQs.