In 1921 Julius Morowitz and Eva Judtkowitz left their small shtetls of Chmielnik and Stopnica  for the United States; none of their descendants ever stepped foot in Poland again. This short experimental documentary takes the form of a photo-film and follows the return journey of their granddaughter, Laura Morowitz and their great-granddaughters Isabelle and Olivia Schechter. It explores the fundamental question of how we “return” to a place that exists now only in imagination, a place that must be mediated through memory and through art.

 It is not possible to “return” to Stopnica or Chmielnik; you cannot go back and occupy an historical void, an absence, a place that has become, like hundreds of other shtetls, a wound. Laura can only access these sites through postmemory, a "memory" acquired secondhand through received stories, photos, histories and works of art. But what does it mean to breathe the air, to stand on the soil, or inhale the scent of the lilacs there? How does the imagined past--the romanticized life of the shtetl, the weddings and the births and the celebrations-- intertwine with the present? And how is it entangled with pogroms and persecutions and with the blood-soaked site of the roundups and deportations? Is it possible to redeem the connection, the attachment, the life, and on some level, on any level, to understand it?

While the film shares aspects of the “road movie” and the travelogue, our characters journey through time as well as space, and do not proceed in a linear fashion. The images are brought to life through conversations with those they encounter, both the living and the dead, along with the music written and performed by Laura’s daughter, Olivia, with folk songs and prayers and with the evocative sounds of nature. Where, in who Laura has become, are Stopnica and Chmielnik? And can she find a part of herself a hundred years later in places where little else, beyond the lilac bushes and the birch trees, bears witness to the past?

Our film is a joint Polish-American venture.