The Yiddish village, which in detail recreates the life in a western Ukrainian shtetl of the 1940s, was built by French filmmakers near Kyiv. This has been reported by the JCU President Boris Lozhkin with reference to Deadline on Facebook.
“The film Shttl shows the last hours of peaceful life in a western Ukrainian Yiddish village on the eve of Hitler's Barbarossa operation in 1941,” he wrote.
The shtetl itself was built near the village of Rovzhi, Vyshgorod district. It consisted of 25 buildings, including a tavern and a synagogue, and authentic household items from the 1940s were collected for shooting of the film all over Ukraine.
According to Lozhkin, the film was completed in 2021, and the film drama has already successfully debuted at a number of festivals.
The film town built by the film crew was donated to Ukraine. It was supposed to become an open-air museum of Jewish life and had every chance to become a tourist attraction on a European scale.
“However, just like in 1941, in 2022 the shtetl was gone again – the Russian troops completely destroyed it,” Lozhkin wrote.