This beautiful, reflective account of a writer’s lifelong struggle with his childhood memories of the family he lost in the war quietly accumulates a consoling, affirmative power. Writer/director Jeremy Podeswa, the son of a Holocaust survivor, has adapted poet Anne Michaels’ novel with exquisite sensitivity to the forces that shape the fugitive spirit. Only those who had not seen it were surprised when audiences voted Fugitive Pieces the best film at last year’s Sydney Film Festival.

“Nostalgic, deeply felt, and refreshingly astute, Fugitive Pieces is something of a rare bird these days – a big-budget, transnational historical drama that actually justifies its scope and subject matter with more than visual opulence... With its meandering sense of space and time and its rich sensual engagement, Anne Michaels’ novel has drawn comparisons to Ondaatje’s The English Patient, and similarly Podeswa’s adaptation will draw comparisons to Minghella’s film. But what might have been an overly sentimental romance for uptown crowds is saved by its clear intelligence and its readiness to tackle the history and representation of the Holocaust in ways that are not at all facile...

Born to a Jewish family in occupied Poland, Jakob Beer barely escapes as Nazis kill his father and abduct his mother and sister. Miraculously, he flees into the archaeological dig of Athos Roussos, a visiting scholar who adopts him and smuggles him back to his (also occupied) Greek isle and later to Canada, where Athos is to teach at a university. Much later, as a writer bouncing between Greece and Canada, Beer remains haunted by his family’s mysterious (but likely horrific) fate and thus attempts to reconstruct what he does not know, to act as archaeologist of those events of his life that he himself did not witness...

To be sure, the film delivers jaw-dropping seascapes and enviably languid Mediterranean afternoons – oscillating between the grey, watery dimness of Toronto and Poland, and the gold-blonde light of Zakynthos – but it balances these with a surprising seriousness about history and memory, companionship and love.” — Leo Goldsmith, indieWIRE

“Jeremy Podeswa accomplishes the nigh-on-impossible task of preserving the lyrical flow of imagery and complex emotions in Anne Michaels’ much-admired novel... a work of great sensitivity and beauty.” — Jason Anderson, Eye Weekly