Where Is It Written You Should Be Happy?

Thomas Burstyn is a Jew living in Aotearoa, who works in the media and who is presently making a film & book on his family's personal diaspora. Here is the synopsis of the proposed work. Advance through images to view.

SYNOPISIS

A family of secrets and a suitcase of letters. A mother, a father, and the ghost of his lover. A son and a century-old mystery. Where Is It Written is a foray into the heart of one family. 

A widower, not yet a father, flees occupied Warsaw in 1940 with a woman who is not yet his wife. They are on a train headed east. Their passports are forgeries. They have lost everything, homes, business, family and friends. She is in a loveless marriage. He carries a secret in his valise.

Six decades later, with two children and three grandchildren, IGGY and IRENE move in with their son TOM and daughter-in-law BARBARA. While unpacking, IRENE discovers her husband’s secret: Love letters to the wife who came before, a wife the son had never heard of. Bold, incriminating and passionate, hidden through six decades across four continents. IRENE reads a few lines, desire still ripe on the faded pages. These relics are her kryptonite. She heaves them across the room, letters and photos fly everywhere. Enraged, she seizes a kitchen knife and advances towards her frail husband. TOM intercepts, disarms her, and IRENE collapses, punching herself, wailing, inconsolable. TOM and BARBARA look on in horror. What just happened? Whose letters are they? Who is IRKA? IRENE’s nightmare epiphany: Her 60-year marriage was a love triangle with a ghost.

The letters are gathered and put away. The parents die, and the relics forgotten. Until TOM, now a pensioner, unearths them to discover far more than love letters. Inside is every tangible piece of his parent's emotional lives, his mother's journals, memoirs and erotic short stories. Two people who lost everything, kept everything. 

Told from TOM’s point of view, this archive of treasures is the gateway to a posthumous dialogue. A reverberation beyond the grave, across continents, through decades. Where Is It Written You Should Be Happy? explores a labyrinth of family legend. 

Structured around a table-read, actors explore the archive of IGGY & IRKA’s fiery exchanges. Letters smuggled from inside the Warsaw Ghetto, IGGY’s poetry and philosophical musings, and TOM’s forgotten correspondence with his parents.

Viewed through the lens of old age, TOM hardly recognises his young self. He comes to understand his inheritance as the son of two broken Holocaust Survivors who pretended the war had never happened.

This film is not about war. It's about the microcosm discovered within an archive of life. A love story before the Holocaust and a different one after. How we are shaped by the shadow of our ancestors. 

By unravelling the mystery, TOM discovers himself instead. Things he never imagined. Questions he was too afraid to ask. As a director and cinematographer, he spent a lifetime telling other people’s stories. Now it’s time to tell one of his own.

Thomas Burstyn BIO

Director, cinematographer, writer and producer Thomas Burstyn CSC, is a multi-award winning, Emmy nominated filmmaker with 40+ years’ experience as a cinematographer and director.

Tom directed and photographed the Berlinale award-winning, Oscar shortlisted feature documentary This Way of Life, about a renegade Māori family living on the edge of society.

Burstyn revels in the way his work in the dramatic and documentary mediums cross-pollinate each other.

Tom’s career as a cinematographer is best described as prolific. He has shot over 100 feature films, television dramas and documentaries. He is equally comfortable working on big budget sci-fi extravaganza to micro budget personal projects, finding value in everything he’s involved with.

Born and raised in Montreal, Canada, Thomas Burstyn has spent his career as an itinerant film worker. He has made documentaries in the Amazon, London and India, and shot dramatic movies across Canada and the USA, New Zealand, China, Morocco, Kenya, South Africa, Ireland, and Hungary.

Tom is writing a book about the Simple Cinema© production concept that allows filmmakers to create and manage stylish low budget productions.