My Name Is Sara (2019)

The film is produced in association with USC Shoah Foundation, which was established by Steven Spielberg using the revenue from his Schindler's List. The Foundation is dedicated to creating audio-visual documents of the Holocaust evidence, as well as interviews with the survivors of the Catastrophe. My Name Is Sara is based on a true-life story of Sara Shapiro (formerly Sara Góralnik), told by the woman herself. In 1939 her small Polish hometown of Korets was occupied by the German Army, but that had little effect on the girl’s life, who kept going to her catholic school (even though she was brought up in Judaism). In 1942 the world learned that the Nazi regime was exterminating the Jewish people, and Sara’s mother sent the girl on the run to survive. At the age of 12, Sara and her brother were taken in by a Ukrainian family, where Sara adopted a different name and started working on a farm. This story was meticulously adapted for the screen by the American director Steven Oritt, who materialized contemporary ideas about Jewish education in the narrative feature film (with no over-dramatizing and distortion, only by telling human stories that it is impossible to stay silent about). Andy Intrater, who is himself the son of Holocaust survivors, became the film’s executive producer. The film stars Zuzanna Surowy, a young actress discovered during the Polish casting, and Michalina Olszanska, best known for her lead role in the controversial Matilda by Aleksey Uchitel.