Broken Promise

Slovakia, just before the outbreak of the Second World War. The family of the young Martin Friedmann gathers to celebrate his bar mitzvah and makes a promise: a year from now they will all meet around the same table again. But the war and the hatred of Jews send each of them down an entirely different road. The film tells a boy’s struggle to survive alongside his country’s turn to collaboration. It was adapted from a real life, from what the survivor recounted himself. The promise made at the table stands as the measure from the beginning of the film to the end: who came back and who did not is understood against that table. Samuel Spisak plays the lead in Jiri Chlumsky’s hundred and thirty five minute Slovak film, completed in 2009.