A woman on a bus tour of Poland is left behind at a Jewish cemetery. A Parisian widow receives a call from a man claiming to be her long-lost father. A newly arrived 85-year-old Russian immigrant wanders the streets of Tel Aviv looking for a distant cousin. A lost Eastern European Jewish world echoes in their actions, gestures and turns of phrase. The film quietly builds to a devastating finale that links the characters together in the most profoundly emotional sense. The impressive first festure-length film from Emmanuel Finkiel, the director of MADAME JACQUES SUR LA CROISETTE (HKJFF '01), and featuring many of the same actors.

At one time, the film could have been called "Promised Land." A promised land is typically the place where you're not and where you'd like to go. It's also the memories we have of people who've disappeared, the fantasy of one day finding them again. All of the film's characters have a kind of scar, an emptiness, due to what they've been through. They're searching for peace, happiness. In the end, we know all too well that it's a trap to think that a place, earth, will provide us with these. Right from the prologue, Rivka, the film's unifying character, is faced with her ghosts. She flees from the reality of her marriage and her life, believing that happiness is bound to be elsewhere. - Emmanuel Finkiel

Set just prior to the liberation of the Buchenwald concentration camp, NAKED AMONG WOLVES is the true story of prisoners who risked their lives to hide a small Jewish boy from their captors. Based on Bruno Apitz's novel and featuring Armin Mueller-Stahl (SHINE).

Bruno Apitz book proved to be a bestseller in the German Democratic Republic, a fact that surprised government officials who insisted that East Germany had already confronted the Nazi past and had since moved beyond it. It won Apitz the National Prize of the GDR in October 1958.