Legacy of loss

Director Jeremy Podeswa's Fugitive Pieces is the opening night film at this year's Toronto International Film Festival. (Steve Carty/CBC)

“I did not witness the most important events of my life,” says the narrator of the film Fugitive Pieces. He is Jakob Beer, a writer whose life is forever shaped by the aftershocks from the harrowing murder of his family by Nazis in Poland during the Second World War.

This is the first line of the movie, and it rings like a challenge to the filmmaker, and the audience: How to depict what is not seen? In the bestselling 1996 novel Fugitive Pieces, Canadian author Anne Michaels tackled the subject of stories and events reverberating across generations with writerly obliqueness. Movie director Jeremy Podeswa’s challenge was to find a way to capture a poet’s indirect, ephemeral style in a medium that succeeds on direct sensation and imitation.

“I really felt that I didn’t want to just use the book as a jumping-off point to do something else,” says Podeswa, over coffee in a downtown Toronto restaurant.

After the critical success of his second feature The Five Senses, in 1999, Podeswa turned to television. Though he lives in Little Italy in Toronto, he has worked mostly in Los Angeles the past few years, directing episodes of some high-profile cable series: Six Feet Under, Carnivale and Rome. Working under the quick turnaround pressures of TV has made him, as he puts it, “very agile,” a skill he needed for Pieces. The task of adapting a novel over which everyone feels ownership is daunting enough, never mind that the book itself is a globe-trotting, generation-spanning novel about the Holocaust. Fugitive Pieces has won awards around the world, including the Orange Prize, and been published in 30 countries.

“For me this is always going to be Anne Michaels’s Fugitive Pieces adapted by me,” says Podeswa. “Of course, there’s a lot of me in the movie as well, but there was accidentally a lot of me in the book. I was so familiar with the terrain of it. I didn’t write the book, but in a parallel world I might have written it, just not as well as Anne did.”

Michaels herself gave input into the script, even showing up on set several times (“There was nothing intrusive about it. I encouraged her,” assures Podeswa). The film follows Jakob from the terrifying moment when, as a little boy (played by Robbie Kay), he witnesses the Nazi invasion of his home from behind the kitchen wall where his mother has stashed him. Later, hiding under a pile of leaves in the woods, Jakob is discovered by a Greek archeologist (Rade Sherbedgia) who takes him back to Greece, where he lives out the war and eventually makes his way to Canada. The film flips between wartime Europe and 1970s Canada and Greece, with adult Jakob (Tony-award winner Stephen Dillane) moving through friends and lovers, surfing back and forth on his memories, as he attempts to construct some kind of future out of this broken past.

Jakob (Robbie Kay), a survivor of the Nazi invasion of Poland, is taken in by a Greek archeologist (Rade Sherbedgia) in Fugitive Pieces. (Maximum Films)

“It’s about how loss ripples through time, how things don’t just affect the specific people who go through them, but affect subsequent generations and people around them in ways that are not always acknowledged,” says Podeswa.

Podeswa, who is Jewish, is intimate with the legacy of grief: his own father lost his family in Poland during the war when he was not much older than Jakob. Sponsored by an aunt who had fled to Canada, he made his way to Toronto and married Podeswa’s mother, who had survived the Blitz in England. When Fugitive Pieces opens the Toronto International Film Festival on Sept. 6, Podeswa’s father will be there.

“That’s more nerve-wracking for me than anyone else seeing it. Obviously I want my father to like the movie and feel it says something meaningful to his experience,” says Podeswa. “Also, he’s one of those big fans of the book.”

The Toronto festival closes this year with another film adaptation of a Canadian novel that circles the Holocaust, Emotional Arithmetic, based on a book by Matt Cohen and starring Susan Sarandon and Gabriel Byrne. But neither is a conventional “Holocaust” film in the way of Schindler’s List or Life is Beautiful, and this is intentional on Podeswa’s part. He’s troubled by depictions of the actual horrors of the war, deemed by many as un-depictable. As Theodor Adorno wrote: “Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.”

“I agree with that statement, actually,” says Podeswa. “Obviously, some attempts have been very successful, but I personally as an artist don’t want to go there. What’s great about this book is I didn’t have to change anything in the book to do what I wanted to do, which was deal with the Holocaust in an oblique way. All the iconography that we’re familiar with is outside the scope of this movie. There are no concentration camps. The boy sits out most of the war in Greece on an island and the presence of the war is felt, but you only sort of see it, though you understand it entirely.”

In one sequence, the Nazis occupy a Greek island. Many of the elder locals on Hydra, where the movie was shot, were extras in the film, and they could vividly remember the Germans’ presence. Podeswa recalls that when his soldier actors were dressed in their Nazi uniforms and marching through the winding streets of the town, those who were there assured him they got it right.

“They told me they were tripping back through time. That was very powerful for all of us, a great responsibility,” says Podeswa.

On the narrow roads of Hydra, no cars are permitted, so Podeswa’s team booked donkeys in advance. “They’re not cheap, but it’s amazing how much Panavision equipment you can get on a donkey,” laughs Podeswa.

For his efforts, the film has been selected for the prestigious opening-night slot at the Toronto International Film Festival. “Every short and every feature I’ve made has been [at TIFF], so to come back to open it is amazing,” he says.

In his twenties, Podeswa even worked at the festival, introducing movies, running Q&As and hosting film legends like Al Pacino and Jean-Luc Godard.

“It was great fun,” he says. “But I think I’ll like this better.”

Fugitive Pieces screens Sept. 6 and 8 at the Toronto International Film Festival.

Katrina Onstad writes about arts for CBCNews.ca.

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