While Oritt is asked about the filmmaking, Shapiro is asked about his family background. Zuzanna Surowy stars as Sara in the film. A Polish actress now, she never acted before doing this film. In the talkback sessions, Shapiro and Oritt have found that a younger, gentile audience especially responds to the film, and Oritt credits that to the star of the film, Zuzanna Surowy, the young woman who plays Sara. He felt it would have been too painful for her to know about it.” Unfortunately, Sara passed away in 2018, but she was not aware of the production. “A lot of people wanted to know what Sara’s impressions were of the making of the film.
“In each of the communities where we’re launching the film, we’re depending on a lot of word of mouth and connecting with temples and other Jewish organizations to help spread the word.
“The Maple was picked to present the movie because the location was within the Jewish community, and it shows arthouse cinema,” Oritt said. He remains shocked that Russia invaded Ukraine. Shapiro, who has been a member of Congregation Beth Ahm and a 19-year executive board member of Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation, visited Ukraine before the movie was made and found the people friendly. I think the film has gotten a fair amount of attention because Sara was hiding as Ukrainian Orthodox for 90% of the film.” “We could not have anticipated there would be a war happening in Ukraine, making the movie even more relevant and timely. “Strand has relationships with all of the theater owners across the country, and they had to wait for screen availability,” said Oritt, whose Jewish identity has caused him to share the emotional elements of the film. The distribution was decided by Strand Releasing, which has handled independent films for some 35 years. They talked about the backgrounds of their families during the Holocaust, and ultimately, the two shared production and funding commitments. The idea for the film was made at the suggestion of hedge fund owner Andrew Intrater, who met Shapiro in Florida. She spent years as a kid who had no life. She lived for weeks with her brother, and then they split up.
All she had was a pair of shoes and a dress, and she was all by herself. She was a kid who lost her mother, father and relatives. “I want people to know how hard it was in what she went through and how she handled it,” said Shapiro, a real estate investor and developer who remotely conducted a similar session last summer at the Zekelman Holocaust Center in Farmington Hills. The docudrama displays how Sara Shapiro, living in Poland at age 11, escaped the Nazis by taking on a Christian identity and toiled through grueling domestic work during the war before establishing a family in the United States. Recently seen in New York and California with its general release, the film is expected to be on view in some 35 sites throughout August. 5 at the Maple Theater in Bloomfield Township, where a talkback segment will be conducted by Sara’s son, Michigan resident Mickey Shapiro, and the film director, Steven Oritt ( American Native, Accidental Climber).ĬOVID got in the way of the docudrama’s theater distribution, but it has been a prizewinner at film festivals around the world and has been shown to religious groups in the United States with remote audiences.
Two years after the Holocaust film My Name Is Sara was ready for general distribution, it is being shown Aug. The film has been a prizewinner at film festivals around the world and has been shown to religious groups in the United States with remote audiences.
Zuzanna Surowy and Eryk Lubos in a scene from the film.