Chicago filmmakers is proud to has the special screening of veteran Chicago producer Marian Marzynski?s epic documentary Shtetl (1994, aprox 300 min.) the film begins with a 70 year old Jewish man from Chicago, Nathan Kaplan, who wants to learn more about the place where his father was born.

He writes to the town hall in Bransk, a small Polish village, only to receive an answer from a young Polish gentile that no Jews are left in Bransk; that in fact the Jewish Shtetl died when the 2500 Jews who lived there died where carried by horse wagons to Treblika?s gas chambers in 1942. Fifty years later, the old Jewish man and the young Polish man meet and their encounter with the realities of the past begins. Shtetl carries with it the image of a small community in the midst of a larger indifferent of hostile majority. At its borders, differences breed suspicions and conflict: between Catholics and Jews, between the majority and those who are different. More Jews come back to the shtetl and grapple with the clash between the violence and hatred of the past, and the apparent beauty and peacefulness of the country the pleasantness of the people shtetl, like Claude Lanzman?s Shoah is a universal tale about Jews and those who live around them. Its moral is about civil rights for a minority living in a multi-ethnic society. In a day when new Nazis speak out again and images from Sarajevo have numbed our minds, this story cannot wait to be told. Due to the length of this program there will be an intermission and complimentary food will be served.