CHASING PORTRAITS
Moshe Rynecki was a prolific Warsaw-based Jewish artist whose body of work reached close to eight hundred paintings and sculptures before he was killed at Majdanek during the Holocaust. Aware that her family had only managed to save a small fraction of Moshe’s works, and that many more pieces might have survived and still be out there somewhere, Elizabeth Rynecki, his great-granddaughter, has been on a decades-long quest to find the lost art. Chasing Portraits accompanies Elizabeth as she sets out on an emotional journey to rediscover her great-grandfather’s legacy of stunning and evocative paintings depicting the everyday lives of the Polish-Jewish community prior to the war – a veritable historical treasure that offers a rare glimpse into a vibrant and thriving world that was all but erased by the Holocaust. Spanning decades of Elizabeth’s life and four generations of her family, this heartfelt and very personal documentary is a deeply moving narrative of the richness of one man’s art, the devastation of the Holocaust, and one woman’s unexpected path to healing.
Screening of the film CHASING PORTRAITS and Special Guest Speaker