(Ninas resa) Feature film. East of West Film; 120 min.
Writer: Lena Einhorn
Director: Lena Einhorn
Producer: Kaska Krosny
Photographer: Dan Myhrman
Sets: Katarzyna Boczek
Editor: Irene Hatz
Nina: Agnieszka Grochowska
Fanja: Maria Chwalibóg
Rudek: Paweł Iwanicki
Artur: Andrzej Brzeski
Celinka: Iwona Sitkowska
Narrator: Nina Einhorn
Produced by East of West Film for Sveriges Television, Drama, Storch & Storch AB, Svensk Filmindustri AB, with support from the Swedish Film Institute
Nina’s Journey takes place in Poland and the Warsaw ghetto during the second World War. The main characters are Nina Rajmic (the director’s mother) and her family. The film portrays a young Jewish woman’s coming of age under exceptional circumstances. Nina fell in love, she celebrated New Year’s Eve parties, she graduated from senior high school – all in the Warsaw ghetto. When the war ended she was ready to start studying medicine. One could almost say that she experienced normal teenage years in those warped times.
If it wasn’t for the fact that everyone around her vanished, one by one.
Nina’s journey starts with a happy trip to America in 1937. She is twelve years old and looks forward to visiting her relatives in New York. It ends in 1945 when she returns to her apartment in Lodz: of all the family, of all the relatives and friends, of all her classmates – only she and her brother Rudek are alive. They are among those three hundred people out of half of a million who survived living through the entirety of the Warsaw ghetto.
“I never regretted not staying in America, never” was Nina’s remarkable reflection half a century later.
Nina’s Journey is a feature film, shot in Warsaw with Polish actors, but it has a documentary thread. The events portrayed in the film are commented by Nina herself, in an interview made before she passed away, in 2002.
