Everything is Illuminated

USA 2005, 104 mins, English, Russian, Ukrainian

Director Liev Schreiber, featuring Elijah Wood, Eugene Hütz

This American biographical comedy was adapted from Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel of the same name.  Jonathan Safran Foer, a young American Jew, goes on a quest to find the woman, Augustine, who saved his grandfather, Safran Foer, during the Holocaust in a small Ukrainian town called Trachimbrod that was wiped off the map when the Nazis liquidated Eastern European shtetls.  His guides are a cranky, seemingly antisemitic grandfather, his wound-up dog named Sammy Davis, Jr., Jr., and his enthusiastic grandson, Alex, who constantly chatters with a unique command of English and a passion for American pop culture that keeps the arduous journey lighter.

‘Liev Schreiber’s Everything is Illuminated begins in goofiness and ends in silence and memory. How it gets from one to the other is the subject of the film, a journey undertaken by three men and a dog into the secrets of the past.’ (Robert Ebert)