FUGITIVE PIECES

 

SHOWTIMES

Moving back and forth in memory this is the riveting poetic portrait of a man emerging from a horrific childhood episode that in a sense froze his life. From his hiding place in his Polish Jewish family home, the boy Jakob, witnesses the beating and killing of his father and mother and then his sister dragged off by Nazi soldiers. Terrified, the boy flees his home and buries himself with dirt and leaves up to his neck. He is discovered there by Athos a Greek archaeologist, on a dig nearby. His work, most fitting here, is his sensitive peeling away layers of the past. The lifelong relationship of Jakob and Athos begins with Athos uncovering Jakob’s body and ultimately sheltering Jakob’s life as he continues his seemingly futile effort to come to terms with Jakob’s past. Based on an award-winning first novel by poet Anne Michaels, writer-director Jeremy Podeswa, child of Holocaust survivors, employs the supple power of film storytelling to move smoothly back and forth in time from childhood to the present to chronicle Jakob’s struggle to emerge from a frozen life in the past. Athos and Jakob form a surrogate family as adoptive son and father and their life together settles in Athos’ Greek island home and Toronto, Canada where after WWII, Athos secures a position teaching and writing at the university. Jakob becomes a writer whose life is literally buried in the handwritten pages of his personal journals. There he explores what amounts to his stalled existence. Two very different women will enter his life and play a key role in his struggle to unseat his past. The power of this film is generated by every level of artistic creativity that draws viewers into the inner lives of the characters–Vic Skolnick

Canada/Greece, 2007, 105 min., color