Vishniac

Post-screening discussion with director Laura Bialis and executive producer  Nancy Spielberg 

Director Laura Bialis’s penetrating documentary, produced by Nancy Spielberg and Roberta Grossman, looks at the complicated life of the legendary photographer Roman Vishniac. The now-iconic images of Eastern European Jewish life he captured in the 1930s—taken to help raise funds for Jewish people in need, which later became documentation of communities entirely wiped out—remain his most renowned output, yet as this wide-ranging portrait, told from the perspective of his daughter Mara, reveals, his artistry transcended both historical eras and aesthetic movements. While tracking his early life in czarist Russia to his celebrated artistic career in Weimar Berlin to the wartime escape of his family to America to his groundbreaking scientific work in microscopic photography, Bialis’s film doesn’t shy away from Vishniac’s difficult personality and proclivity to bend his own truth. It’s a nuanced snapshot of one of the last century’s most important image-makers as well as the story of a century marked by the increasing importance of photographic evidence.