Die Hälfte der Stadt

Film director Pawel Siczek discovered a missing treasure after almost 100 years: 10,000 glass negatives left behind by the photographer Chaim Bermann. At the beginning of the 20th century Bermann had worked, just like his father, as the village photographer in the Polish town of Kozienice, portraying the Polish, Russian and German inhabitants: both Jews and Christians, soldiers, farmers, lovers and small children. He believed that cultures could coexist peacefully, even when the political climate turned against him and his family in the 1930s. He refused to the last to flee from Kozienice.

With the aid of partially fractured photo negatives, Pawel Siczek reconstructs Chaim Bermann’s life. Former neighbours speak in interviews, browse through photo albums and recall their life in Kozienice. Gently and personally, Siczek tells of the Jewish deportation, life in the underground, the mass exodus and ultimately the obliteration of “half the town”. The atrocities of the Holocaust flare up over and over again in animated flashbacks. But the documentary film also portrays everyday scenes from ordinary lives, capturing cheerful and hopeful moments in hand-painted, almost storybook-like animation sequences. In his deftly created montage, Siczek brings Bermann’s fate to light step by step with current scenes, in which he accompanies a young photographer couple in search of Bermann’s traces in Kozienice.

“Die Hälfte der Stadt” premiered in the Museum of Polish Jews in Warsaw and was screened at Dok.fest München, among others. Nominated for the FFF Documentary Talent Award, the film celebrates its Swiss premiere at Fantoche.