2022 | Documentary | 78 min. | Russia
The phenomenon of the Soviet Jew is not quite perceptible. Jews were called "the main mystery of the USSR". How could they remain Jews without generally keeping to their religion, language, and traditions, and often willing to adopt new traditions? Anna Narinskaya, a prominent culture expert and journalist, who grew up in a "non-Jewish Jewish family", talks to the witnesses of the epoch, her friends and relatives, anthropologists and researchers of popular culture, and seems to have some progress in answering this question.
Directors Statement
A starting point for the “Find a Jew” film was the exhibition with the same name, which was authored and held by Anna Narinskaya in Moscow in 2020. The author's search for an answer to the main question "what is a Soviet Jew?", as well as the complexity and versatility of the topic itself, required director Igor Sadreev and director of photography Mikhail Orkin to find a special form and language for the future film. Therefore, "Find a Jew" is a kind of “historical detective”, which combines the techniques of documentary and feature films, but does not come down directly to the mockumentary or docufiction genre. That’s why filming was preceded with a long preproduction phase. For more than eight months, the author, director and editorial team of the Amur Waves studio were looking into the matter, extracting information from archives and dozens of living witnesses scattered around the world, and then meticulously sewing everything into a single canvas, like pieces of a puzzle. Filming took place in the fall of 2021, when the coronavirus epidemic in Russia and the rest of the world was just about to subside (at some point, it knocked out the director himself for two weeks), and borders remained armor-plated. Nevertheless, the group managed to visit not only Moscow and St. Petersburg, but also Tel Aviv and New York. The last scenes of the film were shot underground at a depth of 20 meters in a frosty January 2022. The film crew chose a secret underground fresh water collector built in Soviet times to be used in case of war as a filming location. All filming equipment and large-scale scenery, including several thousand books from old libraries, were loaded there with a construction crane through special holes in the ceiling.
