Film: Treasure
Cast: Lena Dunham, Stephen Fry, Andre Hennicke
Director: Julia von Heinz
Rating: 2.5/5
Runtime: 111 min

This film is based on Australian-born novelist and essayist Lily Brett’s 2001 novel ‘Too Many Men’ about a father and daughter who travel to Poland to explore the father’s tragic past. One of the book’s features involves a series of conversations between the daughter and the ghost of Auschwitz commandant Rudolph Hess.

The premise is simple. The child of two Auschwitz death camp survivors sets out on a journey to learn about her family. Ruth (Lena Dunham), an American journalist, plans a trip to her ancestral home in Poland. Her father  Edek (Stephen Fry) doesn’t want her to go alone and decides to join her. Ruth wants to visit the family home in Lodz where they were once a successful industrial family before the Nazi’s confiscated everything and sent Edek and his wife to Auschwitz. But Edek is wary of revisiting that agonising past. Edek doesn’t want to open the door to his harrowing experiences in Auschwitz but Ruth’s eagerness to understand her own history leads them both to a healing that is much-needed.