Finding himself irritated but intrigued when asked “are you Jewish?”, secular young Canadian filmmaker Jamie Kastner takes his cue from documentary cinema’s rabble-rouser-in-chief Michael Moore and goes in search of the motivations and meaning behind what he’d long felt to be a loaded question, “Are you Jewish?”.
His odyssey gets under way with a belated barmitzvah in orthodox Brooklyn, before going global and taking him from Amsterdam to Auschwitz, via Jerusalem.
Kastner’s final destination, Poland, leaves him appalled and visibly shaken, invoking the ‘Holocaust tourism’ debate and in the process eclipsing earlier bagel-shop witticisms. Kastner’s approach is guaranteed to divide audiences as much as the film’s provocative title. Whatever your view his journey is undeniably eye-opening.