The film pays tribute to the dead, to a language, and to an entire culture. In one continuous shot, SHTTL shows the lives, loves, and inner conflicts within a Yiddish-speaking shtetl on the border between Ukraine and Poland – one day before the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. A young, aspiring filmmaker returns from Kyiv to his village and plans to run away with his true love who is engaged to another man, disrupting the balance of the whole town. A day in the life of a Jewish Ukrainian village before it completely disappears…

Today, there are no such villages in existence; the film team fully reconstructed a traditional ‘Shtetl’ in the outskirts of Kyiv, which was planned to be turned into a museum, before it was ironically destroyed by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

The film will be shown in Yiddish with english Subtitles.

After the screening there will be a discussion with a Ukrainian historian of Jewish studies Prof. Vladyslava Moskalets (Ukrainian Catholic University, Lviv).
Chair: Prof. Kornelia Konczal (Bielefeld University).