ABOUT
The Podkamieners is a series of short films that reimagines the Holocaust documentary genre by juxtaposing rich and realistic animation with moving first and secondhand accounts. The series follows a group of related Holocaust survivors who were forced to flee their small town of Podkamien, Poland and hide in the woods at the peak of WWII.
Each film in “The Podkamieners” illustrates stories of survival that words alone could not justify, from a family of 30 finding refuge in the basement of a monastery, to a mother and son hiding in a coffin-sized bale of hay for more than 16 months.
But beneath those extraordinary stories lies the subtext of the lingering aftermath of the Holocaust, and its effects on survivors and their children alike. The films are punctuated by the complex nuances of surviving genocide, highlighting the contrast between those survivors who choose to remember their experiences and those who’d prefer to forget.