The winner of a richly deserved cinematographer's award at the 1993 Cannes Film Festival, Ivan & Abraham is the story of a sweetly rebellious boy growing up in a loving but oppressive Jewish community in 1930s Poland. When his domineering grandfather forbids him to visit his gentile best friend, the two boys flee their village and set out for the country, where they are soon set after by the Jewish boy's idealistic Communist cousin and his cousin's young fiancee, another exile from their village. At once fairy-tale simple and maddeningly complex, Ivan & Abraham offers a wonderfully complicated portrayal of a close-knit Jewish community coming apart due to the combined forces of class struggle, anti-Semitism and the pressures of assimilation. With the Holocaust looming, the movie paints a breathtakingly beautiful and heartbreakingly sad portrait of a world, a place and a community that won't exist for much longer. As a portrayal of childhood edging toward adolescence, Ivan & Abraham is refreshingly unsentimental, and filled with scenes of almost surreal grace, as when the disguised boys encounter a pretty, blonde-haired, blue-eyed girl who explains to them calmly and sweetly how Jews murdered Christ and kill Christian children for Passover. Although it lacks the sort of big emotional epiphanies that Americans seem to expect of foreign films, Ivan & Abraham is a quietly stunning movie filled with beauty and wonder.