“What if a girl in the Holocaust had an Instagram?”
The rhetorical question involving the two non-intersecting worlds inspired a project based on real events and called “Eva Stories,” retelling how a Jewish teenager went through the horrors and nightmares of the Holocaust.
Filmed in Ukraine by the local production company ColorFilm, the 70-episode tale was shared through Instagram stories reaching out to the social media generation on one of the world’s most popular platforms.
The project was broadcast live on Instagram on May 1 marking Israel’s annual Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Day dedicated to around six million Jewish victims.
The Instagram account of “Eva Stories” has gone viral, with more than 1.2 million followers.
The story idea belongs to Israeli businessman Mati Kochavi and his daughter Maya, who both co-directed the social media film.
“We were looking for a way to deal with this memory and manage this memory in a way that is going to be relevant for the younger generation,” Mati Kochavi said in an interview to CNN.
Mati Kochavi allocated several million dollars for “Eva Stories.”
The social media film recreates the real diary of Hungarian Jew Eva Heyman, played by British actress Mia Quiney.
Heyman started the diary on her 13th birthday in 1944 with descriptions of her family, friends, first crush and school. The teenager proceeds to portray the Nazi’s invasion to Hungary, the new humiliating laws they set for Jews, living in a ghetto. After her diary disrupted, Heyman was deported to Auschwitz concentration camp in then-occupied Poland, where she died.
“Eva Stories” was mostly shot in Lviv, a city of 720,000 people located 540 kilometers southwest of Kyiv.
ColorFilm’s executive producer Yana Kartun and line producer Antonina Patramanska said in an interview to Ukrainian TV channel Priamyi that it was hard to be engaged in such a project.
“The scenes we recreated, they can’t leave anyone indifferent,” Kartun said. “Everyone wept,” Patramanska added.
The preparation and film took the production company around a month.
They had to come up with unusual ways to film to match the extraordinariness of the project. The company used a smartphone and a special camera equipped to shoot vertically to meet the Instagram story format.
ColorFilm has never worked with vertical videos, however, they believe that filmmakers should adapt to modern times.
“The way youth perceives information is a bit different and, thereafter, the language we use to deliver information to teenagers and the young audience becomes different,” Patramanska said.
Apart from the international acclaim with coverage by The New York Times, CNN and The Independent, the social media film was as well criticized for cheapening the Holocaust by using selfie filters and emojis.
However, the creators of the project fend off the criticism.
“Social media, especially Instagram, is shallow if you’re looking for content that is shallow,” Maya Kochavi said in the interview to CNN. “And if you’re looking for content that is powerful and has magnitude and can cause revolutions even, you will easily find it there.”
According to Heyman’s diary, the girl dreamed of becoming a news photographer.
“Eva, we hope that through this project, we made your dream come true,” one of the last Instagram stories reads.
