List Price: $29.95You Pay Only: $26.99 You Save: $2.96 (10%)Prices subject to change.
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Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1
Audience Rating: Unrated
Binding: DVD
EAN: 0720229911252
Format: Closed-captioned, Color, DVD-Video, NTSC
Label: FIRST RUN FEATURES
Manufacturer: FIRST RUN FEATURES
Number Of Items: 1
Publisher: FIRST RUN FEATURES
Region Code: 1
Release Date: December 14, 2004
Running Time: 85 minutes
Sales Rank: 47061
Studio: FIRST RUN FEATURES
Theatrical Release Date: 2003
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Product Description:
This award-winning documentary tells the dramatic and emotional story of a Jewish father who journeys with his two ultra-orthodox adult sons back to Poland to try to find the Christian farmers who hid their family from the Nazis. To his sons, like many offspring of Polish Holocaust survivors, this is a country whose people are incurably anti-Semitic and beyond redemption. His hope is to instill in his insulated and narrow-minded sons the power of interfaith tolerance and trust.
Menachem Daum and Oren Rudavsky's provocative and moving documentary HIDING AND SEEKING was featured at the Barcelona Conference of World Religions and the winner of the North American Interfaith Film Festival Best Film Award for 2004, and Grand Prix in the Warsaw International Jewish Film Festival.
In the course of telling its compelling and dramatic story, HIDING AND SEEKING explores the Holocaust's effect on faith in God as well as its impact on faith in our fellow human beings. It embeds these issues in a deeply personal inter-generational saga of survivors, their children, and their children's children. Filmed in Jerusalem, Brooklyn and Poland, the film focuses on the filmmaker's attempt to heal the wounds of the past by stopping the transmission of hatred from generation to generation.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating:  - Closing Doors Hurts Others
Days after watching this film, I still think about it. It is a pleasant little story that takes us someplace unexpected. It isn't about a Jewish family that was wronged by others during WW2 (although they certainly were). It is about a Jewish family that wronged others after the war. The wrong that they perpetrated was simply one of isolating themselves, of setting themselves apart, of closing the door on others, of not saying "Thank You".
Well, that door is opened 50 years later. And the world is a better place because of it. It was such an honor to see this warm, gentle film.
Rating:  - Jewish Faith and Jewish Tolerance examined
This is a documentary about an Orthodox Jewish father (the director), who is disturbed by anti non-Semitic views held by his sons and many people of his religion. To impart tolerance, the director brings his wife and sons to Poland to find the people who saved his father's life during the holocaust. The director and his family find an elderly woman and man who hid their father and two other Jewish men during the holocaust. The Polish farmers said they did it because they pitied the men. The old woman and man were happy to meet their Jewish guests, but wondered why none of the men who's lives they saved, sent a post card to say thank you.
There are scenes in the documentary showing a synagogue that was destroyed during the war and the disrepair of a cemetery where many Jewish people are buried. Yet as other reviewers of this documentary have pointed out, none of these images are placed in any kind of context concerning what the nation of Poland and allof its people went through during the war. Not only were synagogues destroyed but entire cities in Poland, including Warsaw, were completely burned to the ground.
As I had hoped, during the film, I saw a natural progression of tolerance by the director's sons toward non-Jews. Unfortunately one of the last statements made by one of the director's sons, is that the experience taught him that a "few" gentiles can be good although most are not. I found this comment very disturbing given most Poles, Americans, Catholics, Jews, and ... Read More
Rating: - Deeply Moving Part of an Ongoing Dialogue
I dreaded watching yet another film that would, predictably, open with a pan of rolling Polish countryside, show an elderly peasant, clueless about why he is being filmed, shot in such a way as to make him appear threatening or simply primitive, and hear a indignant voiceover about Poland's "Dark, shameful secrets." Then I would squirm as genuine facts were presented in twisted contexts in order to distort history.
"Hiding and Seeking" is not that anti-Polonist film; it is not Marian Marzynski's "Shtetl," it is not Claude Lanzmann's "Shoah."
The film opens with Menachem Daum, a Jewish American father, playing, for his devout Jewish sons now living in Israel, a recording of a Jewish sermon in which the speaker encourages his hearers to cultivate hostility toward non-Jews.
His sons do not take an unambiguous stance against hatred. Rather, one, especially, struggles to justify prejudice.
Moments like this are always darkly amusing for me as a woman viewer. Every second of every day, men violate, torture, murder, enslave, and commit even more unspeakable crimes against women, and have done so for thousands of years. I wonder how the younger Mr. Daum would feel if I tried to justify hatred of men to his wife or daughter?
I adduce this absurd example merely to highlight: hatred is NEVER moral. Hatred is NEVER justified. Hatred is always a sin and an intellectual failure.
Menachem Daum reports that he grew up with the idea of ... Read More
Rating:  - Some Progress in Polish-Jewish Relations, But...
Without a doubt, this film is much better than the usual anti-Polish films (e. g., Lanzmann's SHOAH, Marzynski's SHTETL) aired previously by PBS (the Public Broadcasting System). While it is gratifying to see, as the film unfolds, a moving away from the demonization of Poles and an appreciation of Polish efforts to rescue Jews, one is nevertheless struck by the depth of Polonophobic sentiment held by some sectors of the Jewish population. It is actually suggested that, if any people are beyond redemption, it is the Poles. Really? I thought that it was the Germans, as embodied by the Nazis, who planned and implemented the Holocaust. Polish contributions to the Holocaust, Jedwabne and the like notwithstanding, were negligible. Whatever wrong Poles did to Jews was trivial compared to what the Germans did to the Jews. One is therefore mystified as to why Jewish anger towards past wrongs continues to be strongly displaced from Germans unto Poles. Is it political?
There is also a veiled anti-Christian reference in the film when it is mentioned that Jews had been persecuted by "others" for 1,900 years. In actuality, Jews had been persecuted long before that. Remember the attempted genocide of Jews at the time of Queen Esther, centuries before Christianity?
While an elderly hunch-backed Polish woman is shown as a rescuer of Jews, it is not mentioned that more Poles are honored at Yad Vashem for the rescue of Jews than members of any other nationality. And no attempt is made by the ... Read More
Rating: - Documentaries don't usually make you cry!
Documentaries usually are designed to make you think. This one makes you think AND feel. It starts with the protagonist, Menachem Daum lamenting that religion in general is in danger of being taken over by hate-filled extremists. We find that Daum's two sons are Yeshiva students who have no particular desire to associate with those who aren't Jewish.`Perhaps, through their grandfather, perhaps, through their studies, they've developed the mindset that non-Jews are basically dangerous and that it's best to erect a barrier between them. This is a journey as father reunites his children with the Polish couple who risked their lives to save the children's grandfather and uncles.
The story drags in part, but press on. The end more than accommodates the lack of professional editing, and it has a few life lessons.
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