Holocaust casts shadow on Toronto film festival opener

3 days ago

TORONTO (AFP) — The 32nd Toronto International Film Festival opened Thursday with a cautionary tale about the lasting impact of deeds, good or bad, through the eyes of a boy suffering from Holocaust survivor guilt.

On the red carpet, moviegoers screamed for Canadian filmmaker Jeremy Podeswa, the son of a Holocaust survivor himself, whose gala presentation “Fugitive Pieces” is based on Anne Michaels’ 1997 award-winning novel.

“In many ways the book is like a sort of caution to humanity,” said Podeswa, whose father survived a Nazi ghetto in Poland and a concentration camp subsequently, in an earlier interview with the Toronto Star.

“If you do good things or bad things, those things have a memory. People have a memory, the Earth has a memory … everything has a memory. So you have to be very careful what you put out into the universe.”

“Fugitive Pieces” is the 10th film produced by Robert Lantos to open the festival.

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