Landscapes of Memory

Director Leah Galant, composer Andrew Orkin, and producer Elijah Stevens expected to attend in San Francisco

A contemplative journey through the physical spaces of Holocaust memorials and the questions that second and third generation relatives carry about family, memory, and survival. Director Leah Galant takes a bold leap into the thorny issues of who Holocaust memorials are made for and the proliferation and mystification of memorial culture. Along the way, she interviews descendants of Nazis who are confronting their families’ complicity in the Third Reich; young Palestinian artists living in Berlin, where their protests against the war in Gaza are conflated with Anti-Semitism; and a South African Jewish father and son who project evocative images of their grandparents onto their former home in Germany and on the entrance to Sachsenhausen.

Driving the filmmaker’s inquiry is her relationship with her father, a therapist and second generation son who tells his daughter, “Memory is subjective.” Galant’s documentary is a profound meditation on the uses and abuses of memorial culture and the intersection of national trauma and collective memory. —Nancy Fishman

West Coast Premiere

JFI Supported: 2025 Filmmaker in Residence

Leah Galant is a New York–based Jewish filmmaker. She was named one of DOC NYC’s “40 Under 40” in 2022. Her directorial debut On the Divide premiered at Tribeca in 2021 and aired on POV in 2022. Galant is a Sundance Ignite and Jacob Burns Fellow. She directed Death Metal Grandma (SXSW 2018), which won Best Documentary at the American Pavilion at the Cannes Film Festival and was featured as a New York Times Op-Doc. She is a member-owner of the Meerkat Media cooperative production company. Landscapes of Memory is her second feature-length film.