Recipient of a 2023 JFI Completion Grant
Recipient of the 2023 Envision Award for the film’s singular ability to envision a world free of prejudice and hate.
As today’s far-right Polish government threatens to imprison anyone who blames Poland for the Holocaust, one aging eyewitness defies the law to search for the Jewish boy she loved 73 years ago, who only could have survived through miracles. Meanwhile, one of the last living Holocaust survivors from the same town relives his jaw-dropping escape from death’s grasp. Among Neighbors combines evocative animation, magical realism, investigative journalism, and revelatory eyewitness interviews to depict a quest against war, hate, and time itself.
Description provided by grantee.
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 and its engagement campaign helped change domestic violence law in multiple US states, including New York, New Jersey, Illinois, and California. 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 Among Neighbors 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 found in the ruins of Auschwitz.