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THE LONELY CHILD

By Marc G. SMOLOWITZ

13TH GEN - as PROD

Jewish - Development 2019

The Lonely Child is a little known song written in the Vilna Ghetto in 1943, describing a girl in hiding. Seventy years after the Holocaust, the daughter of the girl in the song goes on a worldwide quest to explore the unexpected footprint of this song and how it is still transforming lives today.

- Year of production
- 2019
- Genres
- Jewish, Musical, Documentary
- Countries
- USA, POLAND, LITHUANIA, GERMANY, SPAIN, SOUTH AFRICA, ISRAEL
- Languages
- ENGLISH, YIDDISH, POLISH, GERMAN
- Budget
- 0.6 - 1 M$
- Duration
- 100 mn
- Director(s)
- Marc G. SMOLOWITZ
- Synopsis
- “The Lonely Child” is a song written in the Vilna Ghetto in 1943, describing Sorele, a little girl in hiding. Almost 75 years later, the daughter of the girl in the song -- Alix Wall, Writer/Producer -- goes on a quest to meet the people who are keeping the song alive today, and invites musicians she admires to perform their own interpretations of it. Through interviews and performance, the song becomes a vehicle to explore themes of inherited memory and trauma, music and art as resistance, and the song’s relevance amidst today’s refugee crisis. What starts as a personal family story becomes a music documentary that brings together artists from different parts of the world around a common theme.
  
  Shmerke Kaczerginski was a poet from Vilna, a pre-war Jewish cultural center, known as “Jerusalem of the North.” He wrote the lyrics to some 233 songs. In 1943, while in the Vilna Ghetto, he wrote a song that may be lesser known, but is the most familiar to Alix Wall, given her family connection to it. Called “Dos Eltne Kind,” or “The Lonely Child,” it tells the tale of a young Jewish girl, Sorele, whose father has been killed by the Nazis. Sorele’s mother has sent her into hiding with her gentile nanny. The last stanza of the song is: “If someday, a mother you’ll be, you must make your children aware of how we suffered under the enemy. Forget not the past, not for one single day.”
  
  The film “The Lonely Child” will follow Alix’s personal journey; that of a 48-year-old childfree woman, journalist and personal chef, who after years of struggling with the urge to do something with the legacy of the Holocaust in her family, embarks on a large-scale musical project that connects musicians from around the world around the power of one song to cross cultures and touch people’s lives in our contemporary moment. It is directed and produced by award-winning filmmaker Marc Smolowitz, who is himself the Jewish son of a hidden child from Poland. The shared experiences of Wall and Smolowitz become the powerful frame for an international project that will feature stories and artists from the United States, Canada, Poland, Germany, Spain, Israel, and South Africa. The film’s urgency is highlighted by the fact that we’re poised to lose the last living Holocaust Survivors in the coming few years, and we will aim to engage many of them in the U.S, Poland, and Israel in the act of making music and performance of the song as a way of paying last tribute to them and others before they pass away.