Left Luggage

While escaping the Nazis during the war, a man filled two suitcases with what he treasured most and buried them in the ground in Antwerp. The war took his family from him. Years later he is still consulting old maps and turning the soil; what he is really looking for is not the suitcases but the people he lost. His daughter Chaya is a young woman living a modern life and looking for work. Chaya takes a job as a nanny with a large Hasidic family. Her secular manners run plainly against the rules of the house and she is constantly at odds with the father; but the mother is buried under the work, so Chaya stays. Simcha, who is four, does not yet speak, and a particular bond forms between the two of them. It is Jeroen Krabbé's first film as a director, and he is in the cast as well. Isabella Rossellini plays the mother.