Picking Up the Pieces explores the memories, emotions, and beliefs of a diverse group of Jewish Child Survivors. It depicts how children coped with their trauma, rebuilding their lives after the Holocaust. 

Jewish Child survivors were largely silent for 40 years after the Holocaust. As a result the child's perspective of this tragedy has been largely untold. 

This film asks the question: How do you live after surviving the Holocaust? It does so by focusing on 5 themes of special relevance to survivors: Forgiveness, Belief in God, Home, Jewish Identity and Memory. 

Picking Up the Pieces breaks with traditional narratives and testimonials of the Holocaust Documentary genre whilst maintaining a focus on oral history. It does so by adapting an innovative literary tool associated with the expression of the child's experience of the Holocaust: Choral Storytelling. 

Using choral storytelling to express the survivors' experience creates both an intimate emotional link to each survivor while telling their story collectively as if they are part of a choir. The survivors literally finish each other’s sentences creating a fast-paced, emotionally nuanced and haunting composite portrait. At the same time, the film becomes a meditation on the interplay between memory and identity.

Picking  Up the Pieces