Everything is Illuminated

Director: Liev Schreiber
Length: 106 min.
Released: 2005

Everything is Illuminated takes place in Ukraine, one of the former Eastern Bloc countries now poor, but independent.  When the Soviet Union fell apart, Ukrainians threw off the heavy cloak of communism in order to embrace capitalism, and many of its citizens try to make money however possible.  One such way is to guide Americans making nostalgic trips back to the mother country to see how previous generations lived.

The film was adapted from the novel by Jonathan Safran Foer.  Foer studied philosphy and traveled to Ukraine to learn more about his grandfather, a Holocaust survivor.  The subject for his college thesis later became his first novel, Everything is Illuminated.  The actor Liev Schreiber wrote the screen adaptation and directed the film.  (Although Schreiber is American, he is of mixed Central-European heritage, and his maternal grandfather was from Ukraine, just like Foer.)    

Foer is played by Elijah Wood, who goes to Ukraine to unveil a mystery about his grandfather.  His collecting habits and quirks provide interesting encounters with the people he meets along his journey.
One of the most memorable characters is Alex (played by Eugene Hutz, frontman of the gypsy punk band Gogol Bordello), Foer's driver on his odyssey across the Ukrainian countryside.  Alex is part of the new generation embracing Western culture.  

Everything is Illuminated does not demand pity or anger for what has happened in the past. It is the story of one man's connection to his own family history.  The film becomes more and more surrealistic, as past events appear in dream-like sequences mix with present-day.

The score by Paul Cantelon is an excellent introduction to Eastern European music, and holds its own beyond the film.  It is especially interesting the way the theme is played many ways: with different instrumentation and different feels.  Independent films don't always produce a soundtrack, but I was pleasantly surprised to find it at my local library.  (To hear samples of the soundtrack, click here.)

An interesting sidenote about this film: PBS aired a documentary a few years ago about a young Iraqi man who received an internship from Liev Schreiber to work on Everything is Illuminated.  The documentary takes its own path, but gives an interesting perspective of the themes from Schreiber's film in a different context.  The documentary is called Operation Filmmaker and is done by Nina Davenport (who also made Parallel Lines).