Haunting tale

Fugitive Pieces. Photo / Supplied

When Canadian director Jeremy Podeswa's film Fugitive Pieces premiered at the 2007 Toronto Film Festival, it was not the audience or critics' opinion that he was most anxious about, it was his father's.

The film, which opens in New Zealand cinemas on Thursday, tells the story of a boy who witnesses the murder of his parents and sister by Nazi soldiers in Poland in 1942. It is adapted from the award-winning novel of the same name written by Canadian poet Anne Michaels, but could equally be the life-story of Podeswa's father, also a Pole, who survived the death of his entire immediate family in the death camps of the Holocaust.

It was a very personal thing, says Podeswa. "My father was very, very moved by the movie, which I was happy about obviously." Although he had grown up with the knowledge of his father's tragedy, the idea of making a film about the Holocaust had never occurred to 47-year-old Podeswa, until he read Michaels' novel. "I was very aware of my father's experiences, what happened to him and his family. It was not so much the details, but how it affected him and made him what he is. I thought I would avoid that, it was quite a welcome thing not to have to deal with it. But something about the book made me want to do it."

Michaels' debut novel has been published in 30 countries and has won numerous awards, including the Orange Prize for Fiction. Podeswa read it when it first came out in 1996 and was deeply moved, particularly by the echoes of his own family story which it evoked. When asked if he feels he was destined to make the film, he says: "I don't know if it was destiny. But I was really aware of all those points of connection." He firmly believes his family background gave him an insight to the life of the main character Jakob Beer. "Jakob isn't my father. But some things are constant throughout the survivor experience. Certainly there are things I really related to in what Anne was writing about."

Fugitive Pieces describes how 9-year old Jakob is rescued by a Greek archaeologist from a forest in Poland after the slaughter of his family. The archaeologist smuggles him to Greece where the pair spend the war, avoiding the occupying German forces. They then emigrate to Canada, where Jakob (Stephen Dillane) grows up to be a writer, haunted by the death of his family, his own survivor guilt and afflicted by an inability to accept love.

Podeswa says it is a trap for artists to believe that every Holocaust survivor went through the same experiences and suffered the same long-term effects. Jakob's story is just one of millions, including his father's. It was another reason why he was at first reluctant to tackle the subject. "There are so many pitfalls making movies about the Holocaust. It's so unimaginable for most people that nothing that's ever been made does justice to it in a way. I wanted to honour people's memories and not trivialise anything.

"You need to be so delicate about dealing with certain things." The poetic nature of the novel enabled him to tell the story, without depicting what he terms the iconography of the Holocaust – the camps, the trains, the gas chambers.

Fugitive Pieces producer Robert Lantos says the novel initially appeared to defy adaptation. But after writing and directing the films Five Senses and Eclipse, Podeswa felt capable of tackling the project. "I did see it as a film," he says. "It's such a strongly poetic novel – Anne Michaels spent 10 years writing it, so it's like a work of sustained poetry." He describes how he had to cut through the layers of poetry to find the story. "And then I had to put back a lot of the poetry and complexity of the novel."

Michaels had previously resisted many approaches from producers to dramatise her novel, but something about Podeswa convinced the author her work was in safe hands. "I knew that Jeremy had a personal stake in the telling of the story and that, in the end, is what moved me," she says. The result is a haunting and lyrical film which looks ravishing on screen, but also contains extensive narration which may not be to everyone's taste.

Meanwhile, Podeswa has made another WWII drama, the HBO mini-series The Pacific, which he describes as a companion show to Band of Brothers, focussing on the war against the Japanese. He has also worked on series such as Six Feet Under, Carnivale, Rome, The Tudors, Nip/Tuck, Queer As Folk and Weeds. Comparisons have been made between the often dark nature of films produced in Canada and New Zealand, something which Podeswa acknowledges.

"There's definitely an affinity for a lot of reasons. I love New Zealand films." Fugitive Pieces is in cinemas this Thursday.