A pair of young Polish Jews seeking to understand our Jewish roots ends up in Poland and its Eastern neighbors’ protected forests—forests that hide the military ambitions of the last two centuries and the elasticity of borders; forests that our families had to cross and forests in which our families hid; and forests where we feel completely lost. But trauma is always disorienting. This film is an attempt to understand hiding in the forest, and to learn how to navigate forests and history, and the responsibilities of being an Eastern European Jew in the face of new atrocities.

This story found us. In June 2022, Tusia and Wiktor, a pair of Polish Jewish media artists, traveled with Wiktor’s Israeli family to their ancestral hometown outside of Kraków. There, we encountered anti-Semitism, but we also had time to reflect on the beauty of the local forests and the struggles Wiktor’s grandfather had faced when he was hiding in them during World War II. This propelled us onto a journey to understand forests as observers of history and sites where military ambitions and state crimes are easily hidden. Our research was made all the more urgent in the face of the unfolding humanitarian crisis in the primeval forests on the Polish Belarusian border where thousands of non-European refugees lured there by the Lukashenko regime seek to cross into the EU.

We imagine the film as a study of exclusion zones and disappearing ontologies, of looking back, deeper and into the future. It will rely on the traveler-as-a-guide mode of narration and Tusia’s perspective as a Polish-born Jewish woman raised in the US. We will share our reflections on Jewish life in Eastern Europe, current issues of social justice, and the environmental history of World War II. Reflections on the forest tie these themes together. We think of this project as a feature-length poetic documentary that incorporates original and found footage with animation, and electronic music. Tusia is the writer/director/editor on this project, and Wiktor is responsible for cinematography, animation, and music.