Pesach (and We have a trailer!)

Passover has played an important role in the story of this film. My grandmother died just before Pesach in 2018. The day after we buried her, we gathered in my cousin’s home to celebrate our first Passover without her and our first Seder together in more than a decade. Just before Passover in 1944, my grandmother and her family were forcibly removed from their home and taken to a ghetto, where they would celebrate their last holiday together as a family - that holiday was Pesach. The story of Passover is a fitting one to be intertwined with the story of the this film. It’s the story of an enslaved people, breaking free from their chains and emerging to wonder the desert for 40 years. It’s the story of a people emerging from the depths of enslavement and left to deal with the effects of their trauma. It’s a story not too different from that of the one this film aims to tell.

This year on the first night of Passover, we unveiled my grandmother’s grave in the morning and celebrated Pesach together that night as a family. I invited the crew from Blue Slate Films to join us and help document the days processions. They filmed the emotional morning and the transition to the joyous, yet complex holiday of Pesach. It was momentous for so many reasons, but in terms of this film it marked a true emergence. It signified the real start of production. Since then I’ve secured the rights to use the USC Shoah Center’s interviews of my grandmother and her two sisters, I’ve interviewed my father and released the first trailer for the film. The journey through the desert is just beginning, but I’m so excited to see where it takes us.

With that, here is the first trailer for the film: