Unknown Heroes: Soviet Jews and The Holocaust – By Mikhail A. Gershteyn – Short Film Review
Mikhail Gershteyn is taking on a whole new, underrepresented look at the Holocaust. In Unknown Heroes: Soviet Jews and The Holocaust, Gershteyn focuses on preserving and bringing light to the untold stories of Holocaust survivors from the former Soviet Union.
Unknown Heroes: Soviet Jews and The Holocaust is actually a project in development right this very moment! Mikhail A. Gershteyn has created a beautiful taste of what’s to come in his storytelling voice, but aims to create something bigger with this groundbreaking film.
The stories within this film are certainly dark, evil and hard to hear at times. But that speaks volumes to the effectiveness and the quality of the documentary. Modern narrative films have definitely done effective jobs at portraying the horrors of the Holocaust in the past, but this side of the event has been completely underrepresented in the filmmaking world. This uniqueness, and aspect of the unknown is what was most compelling when experiencing this film.
A big difference in the Soviet Union during the Holocaust was the fact that Jews would be killed immediately, right there on the spot. Mikhail states directly that “In just two days during September 1941, Nazis and their followers killed 33,000 Jewish men, women and children.”
The stories expressed in Mikhail A. Gershteyn’s visionary work is told by real victims of the horrors as well as specialists that are experts in the subject, so the quality of these stories is unmatched. It’s raw, horrifying and completely engaging.
The short form iteration of this project, which can be seen on Mikhail’s official Kickstarter Page (CLICK HERE TO VIEW) does a wonderful job of immediately pulling the viewer in, needing to know more. The genuinely and honesty of the piece is felt from the first interview segment, with Zigmund Averbakh. This engaging, yet frightening reality continues across the whole short film, and is paced out nicely with the editing, music and text within this version of the film.
These stories of the Soviet Jews of the Holocaust is eye-opening and incredibly interesting, just as it is also horrifying and upsetting. It’s an aspect of the way that I am amazed I didn’t know much about beforehand. This short film version of this piece is excellent, and very effectively drives home the importance of the larger-form version to come in the future.
Please, check out the trailer down below! Go watch the short film and support Mikhail A. Gershteyn’s future work to come!
We very much look forward to seeing where Mikhail Gershteyn goes next!