Vishniac

When Roman Vishniac began to photograph Jewish communities in Eastern Europe, he did not know he was documenting their final moments. A veritable Renaissance man with interests in biology, physics, and art history, he was a pioneer of microscopic photography and one of the first to use photography as an instrument of documentation. With the rise of anti-Semitism in Russia, his homeland, he fled to Berlin, only to flee again to New York when the Nazis came to power. In all that time, he never put down his camera. His daughter and grandchildren tell the intimate (and traumatic) family story of a man who rose to become one of the world’s best-known nature photographers. The film features his stunning photographs for Life magazine, alongside tragically heartwarming stills of life in Jewish towns just before the Holocaust.