Among Neighbors

Synopsis

Among Neighbors combines revelatory interviews with evocative animation, the film zeroes in on the last living Holocaust survivor from the town, and an aging eyewitness who saw Jews murdered—not by Nazis, but by her own Polish neighbors.

About the Director

Yoav Potash is an award-winning writer, director, and producer. He produced and directed the Sundance premiere documentary “Crime After Crime,” a New York Times Critics’ Pick and winner of 25 honors, including a Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award, the National Board of Review Freedom of Expression Award, and six audience awards. The documentary had a national primetime broadcast on the Oprah Winfrey Network, then streamed on Netflix for two years and is now available on Amazon Prime. The film helped spark movements to change domestic violence law in multiple US states. Yoav also directed the San Francisco IndieFest Jury Prize-winning documentary “Food Stamped,” which was nationally broadcast on Pivot, Participant Media’s cable/satellite network. Yoav is an alumnus of UC Berkeley, where he received the university’s top prize in creative writing. He is producing and directing “Love, Murder and Miracles” as part of a project entitled “Untold Stories of the Holocaust,” which will also include “Diary from the Ashes,” his NEH-funded film about the diary of Rywka Lipszyc, an imaginative teenage girl whose handwritten notebook was only discovered in recent years.

Artist’s Statement

In 2014, I first set foot in the small Polish town of Gniewoszów, a place that had once been home to about 3,000 Jews. Today it was home to none. Ostensibly, Nazi Germany was solely responsible for the eradication of Jewish life in this quiet rural enclave, just as Hitler and his accomplices were responsible for the death of six million Jews across Europe. But when I interviewed town elders, I uncovered a dark secret––local Poles had murdered the Holocaust survivors who returned to the town, a full six months after the surrender of Nazi Germany. Then, just over three years after I began filming, Poland’s far-right nationalist government passed a law to silence the very kind of testimonies I was recording. This attempt at repression, along with the heartfelt testimonies of eyewitnesses who offered me their life’s final testimony, have motivated me to use animation to help bring the stories of the past to life onscreen, and to commit eight years of my life to making “Among neighbors.” 

Festivals, Screenings, & Awards

Warsaw Jewish Film Festival – World Premiere (2024)