Voyages

A very impressive feature about the present-day legacy of the Holocaust, this delicate, deceptively simple film consists of three separate episodes. A group of mainly elderly Jews from France, Germany and elsewhere visit Poland, where their coach breaks down en route to Auschwitz; a middle-aged Parisian is contacted by a Lithuanian man claiming to be her father, unseen since the war and long believed dead; an elderly Moscow woman takes up Israeli citizenship in Tel Aviv, and finds her newly adopted country bewildering. The stories are loosely, but powerfully linked, not merely through the characters but through theme: it's a movie about memory, lost time, the diaspora, identity, exile, searching, trying to find a way to make sense of the past. It's all done with sensitivity, intelligence and not a little humour.