Saturday, January 8, 2011

Collector inadvertently helps another find his past

"Everything is Illuminated," a film that came out in 2005 with Elijah Wood, is a wonderful movie that tells a story of one collector who is moved to find out where a photograph came from and to thank a woman for saving his grandfather's life.
Jonathon (Wood) is the collector and travels to the Ukraine to find a small village that more or less vanished during the Holocaust. His tour guides, Eugene and Eugene's grandfather, end up being related to this village as well, though you're not sure how until the end of the film. Though Eugene does not know it, his grandfather is from the village and pretended to be dead and ignored his Jewish heritage so he could survive. All throughout the film it seems that perhaps the grandfather was one of the soldiers who killed the Jews. He ends up taking his life in the end, once they have left the village and he tells the women the collector is looking for that the war is indeed over. She has been living in a house near the no longer existing village surrounded by sunflowers and collecting items from the village and cataloguing them since the war.
Though Jonathan and his guides start off on a rocky start, they end up respecting one another and having a weird understanding of one another.
I highly recommend the independent film.

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