Fugitive Pieces, which screened at the Seattle International Film Festival on June 14 and 15, is based on the 1996 Canadian bestselling novel of the same name, written by Anne Michaels. The director, Jeremy Podeswa, wrote the screenplay.
The film begins as the story of a Polish child named Jakob (Robbie Kay) who manages to escape from the Nazis by hiding in a cupboard as they come to look for his family. Following the murder of his father and the arrest of his sister and mother, Jakob flees into the forest where Athos (Rade Sherbedgia), a Greek archeologist, discovers him hiding under the brush and saves him by smuggling him back to Greece. The archeologist eventually becomes Jakob’s surrogate father and the pair immigrate to Canada after the war where Jakob (portrayed as an adult by Stephen Dillane), despite his successful writing career, spends years struggling with ghostly visits with his past.
As the film progresses, the plot centers in on the difficulty Jakob has in learning how to open up emotionally as an adult. He is preoccupied with his desire to learn precisely how his mother and sister perished, and spends most of his time researching and writing about the Holocaust, to the point of neglecting the love and attention of his wife, as well as other, living companions.
Podeswa is one of four film directors chosen as part of the Emerging Masters series of SIFF films. He spoke with JTNews while in Seattle to attend the SIFF screenings of Fugitive Pieces, along with his 1999 feature, The Five Senses.
Podeswa said that his decision to make a film out of Michaels’ book had a lot to do with the themes of the novel, with which he strongly connected.
“The book deals with how a person overcomes loss, particularly major loss and trauma, [and] how one deals with love and relationships while experiencing such loss. In a very real sense, love is more than just enriching — it saves lives,” he said. “There is a great amount of compassion for human beings and a great amount of suffering, and this work deals with the war experience in a unique way, and on many different levels, so I was attracted to it as a work of art.”
However, he noted that Michaels’ novel was a difficult choice to adapt to a film. He was repeatedly warned that since it was a poetic novel, the story would lose much of its content and meaning when transferred to the silver screen. But at the same time, the book’s popularity, (due in part to its artistic nature), in turn made it easier for Podeswa to get support for the project.
“When it came out, the book had [a] high profile cultural impact in Canada — everybody read it. This awareness made it easier to raise funds to produce it,” he said.
Along with his love for Michaels’ original work, there was also a personal connection that drove Podeswa, whose father lived in the Lodz Ghetto for most of the war, and who also survived the last year in Auschwitz.
Although Podeswa worked on the screenplay for over five years, the film was shot over a period of just nine weeks, five of them in Canada and four on location in Greece, including on the Island of Hydra, which is so remote that there are no paved roads leading up to the sites where filming took place. Podeswa described it as “a great place for a relaxing vacation.”
Podeswa approached making the film with the intent of bringing Michaels’ story fully to life, and he said that he hopes that the message of her book, which deals with the healing power of love in the face of atrocity, comes through for his audiences.
“You can transcend even the most horrible things. Love is possible for everyone and it takes different forms, yet all love has great value. It’s sort of what makes the world work.”
The power of love
