Shttl is unlike anything you have ever seen: a contemporary black-and-white Yiddish language artificial one-shot film made in Ukraine with a crew that, according to the folks at The National Center for Jewish Film’s Annual Film Festival, is now largely fighting in the war over their land. It’s a fascinating film worth checking out, and I doubt there is another film with quite the same chutzpah.

The title, Shttl, comes from the Yiddish word “shtetl,” referring to small, usually Ashkenazi Jewish villages associated with Eastern European Jewry. But it also lacks the “e” in the English translation as a nod to holocaust survivor Georges Perec’s novel La Disparition, in which the letter “e” never appears. The titular town of the movie sits right on the Ukrainian-Polish border just one day before Operation Barbarossa—the Nazi Germany invasion of the Soviet Union and the frenzied murder of Soviet-occupied Jews.

Mendele (Moshe Lobel) returns to his home shtetl from the film studios of Kyiv for the first time in years and finds his destined love Yuna (Anisia Stasevich) engaged to Folya (Antoine Millet). The Yiddish-fluent Hollywood veteran Saul Rubinek (this year’s BlackBerry, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, Warehouse 13) plays Yuna’s father, the small town’s rabbi. Even he knows Mendele is the better pick than Folya… but the latter never left home, and that’s important to the community and thus to the ministerial keeper of the community. 

It’s in this world, where everyone has the same rabbi and the same butcher, that the artificial one-shot moves through the bustle of extras, daily activities, and casual bickering. I typically don’t care for long oners simply as a technical showcase or for the sake of the gimmick, but that’s irrelevant because that’s not what’s happening here. The non-stop vitality of the shot is absolutely necessary for the purpose of bringing small-town existence to life—with its romances, religious feuds, and dancing all taken into account—on the brink of destruction. The film isn’t always the greatest at hiding the cuts, but it’s easy to look past that for the narrative purpose of the stylistic choice.

On-screen cold-blooded murder is always sad (or should be, but I won’t go there right now) but it’s even more eviscerating when the viewer has been utterly immersed in shtetl life for an hour and 45 minutes with no chance to even slow for the respite of a new shot or a clean scene break. The oner is essential and that makes it more impressive to this viewer than the often digital long oners that achieve greater technical accomplishments. 

Because of this immersion, the film’s ending ruptures the world of the fictional shtetl. Even knowing exactly how Ady Walter’s first feature has to end, I refused to entertain the thought of Operation Barbarossa in the film’s very obviously final moment of peace. Instead of centering the destruction that’s almost baked into the genre of Holocaust story filmmaking, Shttl shows the beauty of life that makes genocide so anti-human. Shttl reminds me of the power of Emmanuel Levinas’s image of the “face of the other.” Levinas, a Lithuanian-French Jewish philosopher who witnessed the shoah first-hand, taught that “the first word of the face is ‘Thou shalt not kill.” If a movie can believe something, Shttl believes Levinas.

Shttl
2022
dir. Ady Walter
min. 109

Screened at the Coolidge Corner Theater as part of The National Center for Jewish Film’s Annual Film Festival.