Starring Jessie Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin
Please watch the film before the event and be ready to discuss it.
Available for streaming on Amazon Prime and Hulu.
Mismatched cousins David and Benji tour Poland to honor their grandmother. Their adventure becomes complicated as old tensions resurface while exploring their family history. A moving exploration of inherited trauma, masculinity, and the struggle to connect while confronting the weight of history and family pain.
The discussion will be led by Dr. Anna Janicki
----------------------------------------------------------------
There are losses and there are losses. There is a pain of loss, but not everyone copes with the pain in the same way. Two cousins are coping with grief. On one hand, grandma dies; on the other, she was a witness to the moment in the history of this world when 12 ml people died, and 6 of these millions were Jews, hunted down and murdered without mercy in the death factories all over Eastern and Central Europe. Grandma was one of these Jews who survived. Young men carry and manage the burden of their grandmother’s and their parents’ unbearable emotional load.
This truth is at the core of Jesse Eisenberg’s masterful “A Real Pain,” a story of two cousins traveling to a place where unspeakable pain was inflicted by human beings on human beings. Humankind for 90 minutes faces the impact of the evil and cousins their own personal demons. On the surface, they could not be more different; however, practically brothers, they have carved out different lives—one is overflowing with emotions, the other practices emotional numbing through more traditional ways of being a man. Both men want to be like the other one. Eisenberg’s brilliant film, with grace and tact, shows how they can’t.
We are in the Heights Medical Building at Cedar-Fairmount. Free parking is in the back of the building. Someone will be at the building’s rear door from 4:15 to 4:45.
This program is FREE and OPEN to the public.
To ensure enough seats are available, please RSVP by June 7th below: