The Southern Arts’ Circuit Tour of Independent Filmmakers continues next week at ETSU with the film “Chasing Portraits” on Monday, Nov. 5, at 7 p.m. The screening, sponsored by the Mary B. Martin School of the Arts, will take place in Brown Hall Auditorium and is free for students, faculty and the surrounding community.
“A lot goes into selecting films to be a part of the film series, and we start off with a pool of over 300 films to choose from,” said Anita DeAngelis, director of the Mary B. Martin School of the Arts. “We look for high quality, feature-length films, and in this case, the quality of the “Chasing Portraits” documentary was good, and the story was also really compelling. The Southern Circuit Tour is a very unique film festival in that only one film is screened at a time, and the filmmakers come to the screening and interact with the audience in a question and answer period following the film with the filmmakers.”
“Chasing Portraits” tells the story of Moshe Rynecki, a Jewish store owner and artist who died during the Holocaust in a Nazi concentration camp. The film follows director and Moshe’s great-granddaughter, Elizabeth Rynecki, on her quest to recover Moshe’s paintings and sculptures that he scattered across his home in Warsaw, Poland, for safe-keeping.
The film is timely considering recent attacks on Jewish peoples in the U.S. and undoubtedly will help spark conversation concerning the survival and evolution of Nazism to present day.
“Some people may think that anti-semitism doesn’t exist, but it does, and one would have hoped that after an event like the Holocaust there would be a sort of awakening and awareness in relation to current day affairs, so I’m sure that how the film ties to recent occurrences will be part of our discussion after the screening,” said DeAngelis.
For more information on featured films in the Southern Circuit Tour and other events sponsored by the Mary B. Martin School of the Arts, call 423-439-8587 or visit etsu.edu/martin.
