Ady Walter had a dream while working on his remarkable Yiddish-language debut feature, Shttl.
He dreamed of bringing the dead back to life. “Cinema can’t save anyone, we don’t save lives, so it’s an insane dream,” admits the French director over Zoom. “But, it was really growing inside me [when I made the film]: I wanted to bring them back, just for a little bit.”
He is talking about the shtetl Jews whose physical existence and way of life were brutally extinguished after the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, in what became known as the Holocaust by bullets.
Hitler’s murderers and their collaborators did such a good job that Walter found himself experiencing “very pessimistic moments” when he realised that many Jews do not know about the reality of what was obliterated. He does not blame anyone for their ignorance “because that’s what the Nazis did”, he says. “They erased the memory of the small, little things, which made up this world.” Shttl is his attempt to “give justice to these people”, for a couple of hours.
Shttl is a Holocaust film, but not the kind we have become accustomed to seeing. There are no ghettos or camps, no cattle trucks, no barbed wire fences and barking dogs, no gas chambers and crematoria. Instead, Walter takes us inside a small but vibrant Jewish community tucked away in the Ukrainian countryside, close to the border with Poland, hours before the German invasion on June 22, 1941. We feel that this is a world that’s about to be engulfed by a black hole, but the people are full of energy and passion, as likely to argue as agree.
Part of realising his dream of bringing this lost world back involved building a shtetl on more than an acre of land near the lakeside town of Rovzhi, outside Kyiv, filming the summer before the Russian invasion. There’s a bitter irony in the timing. He is not sure of the fate of the set, which he’d wanted to leave as a way of educating people about the murdered Jews.
Walter had wanted to make a film about the Shoah for many years, and became “obsessed” with finding an approach that captured the Shoah “without showing it. I came to the conclusion that maybe the only possible way to show something about this, is to basically show not deaths, not the destruction, but the life prior to the destruction.”
What part did the Holocaust play in his own family’s history? There is a connection, of course, he says, “but I’m not going to answer too much about my personal life”.
Nevertheless, he talks about being very close to his grandfather (“He was like a second father to me”), who, despite not giving a detailed account of his wartime experiences, “mentioned a few things, here and there. When I grew up, I realised it was pretty much always around, in a very weird way.”
There’s a dedication to two brothers at the start of the film, his grandfather and great-uncle.
“Once, my grandfather told me that he had to dig a hole in the forest with his brother to escape the Germans. They witnessed what I never saw: they became my eyes and my soul; my love for all the people who witnessed that is infinite.
“My father told me something, it’s funny because I’ve never mentioned this, but he said: ‘I can’t believe that I’m born a few years, like 10 years, after the Shoah.’ He used to say that to me and I think he was a very tormented child, as a second generation boy. He never really discussed it, but it made a very strange mood.”
When Walter was eight, his father gave him Maus, Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel about his father, a Polish Holocaust survivor. “Eight is not an appropriate age, by the way,” the director laughs. “I don’t know why he did that, but it changed my life.” For the first time, he says, everything that existed in the silence was “under my eyes”.
In 2014, Walter was in a bar in Berlin. He took out a pen and paper and started making notes about a Jewish soldier on leave who returns to the shtetl where he grew up to “ravish” the woman he loves.
“They’re like Romeo and Juliet,” he says. Hours after he arrives, the Germans launch Operation Barbarossa, cutting off their escape.
With a few changes, the man became Mendele (Moshe Lobel), a secular Jewish filmmaker, who comes back to the film’s fictional shtetl for his sweetheart, the daughter of the shtetl’s rebbe (Saul Rubinek), a few days before she is to be married to a Chasid who has eyes on her father’s position.
Walter’s depiction of the society inside the shtetl is detailed and unromanticised. These were complex groups of people with different opinions about politics and religion, and about how to survive.
“People were into passionate debates all the time,” he says. “What I really wanted to do is try to portray all the diversity of these people to give them justice. They deserve to be seen with their complexity, intelligence and emotions. Like I didn’t want to show the religious people as many movies show them, as stubborn and stupid. They were not stubborn. They were not stupid. They were different.
“So many things, so many colours, have been forgotten. Because, at the end of the day, one thing arrived and made them all equal, in death and destruction, and made them disappear.”
The shtetls were changing before the Nazis arrived due to a conflict between modernity and tradition that Walter explores through the relationships between the film’s characters.
“The shtetl was like any other type of society at the time. Ideologies were erupting. And, of course, the immigration to the cities, to other countries, would have accelerated. So, the shtetls would have disappeared anyway.
"They would not have been destroyed, which is totally different; they would have disappeared. But no one really knows. And that’s the tragedy of it: we don’t know because it’s all gone.”
Some buildings on his set were constructed in such a way that allowed Walter to create the illusion that the film is a single shot (“I was never interested in shooting it as a real single shot. It’s as real as a single shot can be.”) that works organically with a narrative set over one day.
Given Ukraine’s long history of antisemitism and the fact that the complicity of locals during the Holocaust is still debated, shooting the film there could have been difficult. But Walter insists it did not compromise the script. There are still direct and indirect references made to pogroms, with lines about not tarring all Ukrainians with the same brush.
“You cannot turn all the Ukrainians into pogromists,” he says. “I’ve been very influenced by Aharon Appelfeld [a Romanian Holocaust survivor], who writes about that very precisely. He shows how things were complicated and how things were grey. I’m talking about the relations between, basically, Jews and Ukrainians who were not Jewish, because Jews were also Ukrainians. We’ve got to be very careful with the words these days.
“So, it was very complex.”
To him, Ukraine felt “haunted”. “You could sense death there all the time,” he says.
He could also feel the drumbeat of the coming war, which was already on the news every day because of fighting in the Donbas.
When 150,000 Russian troops started moving towards the border, insurers refused to cover the actors, “especially the American actors”, preventing filming. “Suddenly, during June 2021, it became a little bit more quiet, and then we had a very short, reasonable window to shoot the movie.”
When he returned in March this year, he found his production designer working for the army.
Shtll - Still 2
Some of the shtetl’s inhabitants awaiting the Nazi invasion in Walter’s film
“It’s crazy. And very strange. Especially considering the movie itself, it’s a weird thing. I don’t even have the words for it,” he says.
Rather than dismantling the set and its beautiful wooden synagogue (“We put a mezuzah on the outside and it could function as a shul. We did the bracha, and everything was done by the book.”), the producers thought it could become an education centre for Ukrainian children to learn about the shtetls. Now its fate is uncertain.
“There was a palisade built around it to protect it,” he says. “We know there was heavy fighting, especially where we were, and now it’s full of mines and the bridges have been destroyed. So we don’t even know what has happened to the set. What we do know is it’s full of mines.”
Shttl (+Q&A with director Ady Walter and producer Jean-Charles Lévy) will screen on November 17 as part of the UK Jewish Film Festival, ukjewishfilm.org/film/shttl/
