By CHES Member Shirley Siegel
RSVP required: https://www.templeisraelottawa.ca/form/soda
On April 24th, Temple Israel, in collaboration with CHES, will present a film screening of Soda, an exploration of interwoven themes of love, guilt, and survival within a community of Holocaust survivors and former resistance fighters. The award-winning Israeli movie, directed by Erez Tadmor, one of Israel’s top directors, is a historical drama set in Israel. It is also a tragic romance starring two of Israel’s most popular actors, Lior Raz (Fauda) and Rotem Sela (Beauty and the Baker).
Director Tadmor has turned his own family story into a powerful tragedy. It depicts a compelling account of how trauma, in this case, Holocaust trauma, continues to haunt survivors and their children for the rest of their lives. The word “Soda” in Hebrew means “her secret,” but it also means soda water. The title here works both ways. The setting is a little Israeli community that is supported by a soda bottling plant, back in the early 1950s.
As reflected in the film, in real-life, the director’s maternal grandparents and his mother survived the Holocaust as partisans in the Polish forests. After the war, they were in a displaced persons camp and then came to Israel. While they conducted heroic feats during the war, their lives afterward were not easy; they emerged from the war with serious post-trauma.
With an exceptional cast, this visually arresting drama tells a captivating story of Holocaust survivors that focuses on an almost forgotten time and environment. The film is dedicated to the director’s grandfather who survived the Holocaust but who died when the filmmaker was a child.
A short presentation by Mina Cohn and a Q/A will follow the screening.
