Treasure – Film Review - Fremantle Shipping News

This poignant road movie tells the story of a deeply unhappy divorced New York music journalist who travels to Poland with her widowed father. They travel in 1991, shortly after the fall of the Iron Curtain and the dissolution of Soviet control, and she is keen to explore the places of her family’s past and understand more about her heritage. The film, ‘Treasure’, is based on Lily Brett’s very popular 1999, autobiographical novel ‘Too Many Men’.

Lena Dunham plays the character Ruth, the daughter — a character Ms Brett has based herself on. Stephen Fry, plays her father, Edek, a holocaust survivor who was imprisoned at the concentration camp at Auschwitz. Edek survived while the rest of his large Jewish family perished.

Ruth plans a busy itinerary of historical landmarks and her father’s childhood haunts. Edek tries to divert her attention and sabotage her plans. It is a touching father-daughter drama. Fry plays a slightly comedic father and Dunham a damaged woman with eating disorders and a habit of self-harm. The journey takes them from Warsaw to Lodz, Ruth’s father’s hometown, then to Krakow and the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp.

The film unpacks generational trauma and the legacy of Auschwitz and institutionalized anti-Semitism. There is stunning and horrific footage of Edek’s return to the death camp, now a tourist site. The shadow of the holocaust dominates most scenes.

Treasure, like all holocaust films reminds us that death camps did exist and that humans are capable of complicity in unthinkable mass murder and genocide.

Treasure opened in Luna cinemas on 14 July and is still showing.

Rating: 8.5 out of 10.

By Jean Hudson

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