Listed as one of the Best Films of 2023 by "The Washington Post" and Winner of the Audience Prize for Best Documentary at the JxJ Film and Music Festival, "A Pocketful of Miracles: A Tale of Two Siblings" screens at Cornell University (616 Thurston Ave., Ithaca, NY 14853) on April 10, 2024 at 7:00PM
"If you want me to describe my life in a few words, then it's a 'pocketful of miracles'. Things that I really can't explain.” This is how David Ciesla describes his life.
"A Pocketful of Miracles: A Tale of Two Siblings" is a family memoir focusing on the pre-war and wartime experiences of siblings Hanka Ciesla, who passed as a Polish Catholic within Germany, and Dudek Ciesla, who survived Auschwitz, and the story of Harold Kempner, who captured their reunion in Berlin as a military government journalist. Helen and David Ciesla’s life stories are indeed peppered with improbable coincidences and absurd strokes of luck, not to mention tales of remarkable fortitude and perseverance; similar to that of many Shoah survivors, and yet special and unique.
Berlin-born filmmaker Aviva Kempner chronicles her mother’s and uncle’s lives before and during World War II, from their idyllic Jewish upbringing in Poland to their tearful reunion after surviving the Holocaust. This moving documentary ends by sharing the incredible lives they built in America as painter Helen Ciesla Covensky and businessperson and philanthropist David Chase and serves as a reminder of why it is so important to make films about the fate of those who survived.
Filmmaker Aviva Kempner will join for Q&A after the film with Professor Elliot Shapiro, Senior Lecturer in the Knight Institute and the Knight Foundation Director of the Writing in the Majors program.
Free admission. Sponsored by the Jewish Studies Program.
To reserve tickets: https://cinema.cornell.edu/pocketful-miracles-tale-two-siblings
Film website: www.pocketfulofmiraclesfilm.org
