Half the town

Animadoc
2015/ 88 min
Direction: Pawel Siczek

The film tells the story of Jewish photographer and local politician Chaim Berman. Before World War II starts, he is committed to a peaceful coexistence of Poles, Jews and Germans in his Polish hometown. But his cosmopolitan attitude will soon be his fate ...
Through interviews, photos, and animations, the film convincingly attempts to reconstruct and bring to life the lost history of the city of Kozienice and its photographic chronicler Berman.

The legacy of photographer Berman consists of almost ten thousand portraits on glass negatives, which remained undetected for decades. They show unknown people from Chaim Berman's everyday life, the faces of a forever lost European era. These glass negatives are the starting point of the film, which tries to reconstruct the lives of its creator and the society of his time with these pictures.