Fiction or non-fiction, on paper and on screen, the appalling lot of European Jewry from before Kristallnacht to VE-Day and after, is a hot theme. Whether from guilty conscience or a bloody Middle East, racial cleansings on several continents or the resurgence of the Right, the Holocaust -- its roots, methods and consequences -- arouses disparate emotions and has received wide treatment, from starkest tragedy to (once unthinkable) comedy.

Noting a new Holocaust documentary distributed on the average of every other month since 1990 -- and at least six times that number completed but not finding a necessary middleman -- the recent article "Too Much of a Bad Thing?" raises questions of overproduction and underachievement. It would be heartless to doubt the sincerity, at times anguish, of those turning out such treatments, but criticism must at a certain juncture stand back to judge in terms, not of what, but how. Right thinking and feeling do not of themselves translate into art -- indeed, are often inimical to it. Well-intentioned, most documentaries on the subject are pedestrian: dealing with the war period or survivors decades later, they boil down to unimaginative compilations of facts and memories, actuality footage jumbled with headshot interviews. The handful of exceptions are those which realize cinema's need to move and inform by way of story, a thread with recognizable beginning, middle and ending.

One such exception is co-producers/-writers/-directors Menachem Daum and Oren Rudavsky's Hiding and Seeking: Faith and Tolerance After the Holocaust, second of a planned trilogy. Consciously done as home movie (and there are several shots, as well, of participants snapping away on digital cameras), the story concerns, yes, Poland's notorious anti-Semitism, the insularity of Orthodox Judaism and the sometimes mixed motives of the Yad Vashem Righteous Among the Nations, Gentiles who risked everything to aid Jews. More, however, it is a consideration of brotherhood, of forgetfulness and almost too tardy remembrance, and of four generations, running to great-grandchildren.

This is the tale of European-born, Brooklyn-bred Orthodox humanist Daum in his efforts to open his Jerusalemite Talmud scholar sons to the fact that goodness and suffering, evil and opportunism, are not restricted to any single group. During this quest, Daum also comes to terms, and peace, with his own rigid Hasidic father and more tolerant, now deceased mother, DPs who came to this country in 1951. Proud of his grown boys Tzvi Dovid and Akiva, he is nevertheless uneasy with their religio-ethnic exclusivism and so engages them in mild debate. Alarmed when wife Rifka reports a rabbi's mantra of hatred for, and rejection of, non-Jews, Daum takes his family on a journey to their roots in Poland, to discover and possibly repair bridges.

As they wander capital and village, the camera focuses neither on summertime tourist sites nor on faces in close-up but, rather, catches speakers set into a background of scene. To minimal narration, with grace and gentle humor, they interact through dialogue, creating character, which in turn builds story. Seeking the family that hid Rifka's father Chaim and his two brothers from Hitler's soldiers, they observe young people laughing at their beards and yarmulkes, they clean leaves from neglected Hebrew tombstones, Rifka is affected beyond words in a decrepit roofless synagogue, and Tzvi Dovid wipes a tear as his father leaves memorial lines where a Ghetto gallows once stood.

A year afterwards, the family returns, a granddaughter in tow, to revisit and to make amends for an ungrateful half-century's neglect. Tears and music at an award ceremony and later dinner, kisses and promises, toasts over schnapps. Still hesitant, Daum's sons have changed and learned, wounds been re-examined, a beginning made, an opening realized, and a circle completed.

Commentators like Stephen Feinstein and Lawrence L. Langer believe that Holocaust documentaries have gone as far as they can and that fiction films must now pick up the torch. Among many choices, filmmakers could do worse than start with Primo Levi's fact-based Jewish guerrilla novel, If Not Now, When? Meanwhile, with its development of storyline, Hiding and Seeking stands on its own merits and is also a move in the right direction of fusing documentary reality with the appealing flow of story's conflict, complication, development and resolution. 

(Released by First Run Features; not rated by MPAA.)