A Real Pain

LIVE, IN-PERSON SCREENING @ AZJHS
Tuesday, April 8, 2025 at 7PM MST
Sponsored by Mark and Susan Sendrow

The Arizona Jewish Historical Society is excited to announce its screening of the recently released “A Real Pain”. The film depicts two Jewish American cousins played by actor and screen writer Jesse Eisenberg (David) and Kieran Culkin (Benji), winner of a Golden Globe Award, who set off on a so-called heritage tour of Poland to honor their recently deceased grandmother who survived the Holocaust. They’ve decided to visit the house where she grew up. Theirs is an unexpectedly emotionally fraught journey, and a piercing, tragicomic lament from the Jewish diaspora. Eisenberg had his own conflicted feelings about everything from generational trauma to Holocaust tourism (he has said in interviews that the initial inspiration for the film was an incongruous advert promising a “Holocaust tour, with lunch”).

The journey begins and ends in the United States, but mostly unfolds during a compressed road trip through Poland that they set off on with a British tour guide and five other travelers. Together, the group tours Warsaw, crosses pastoral countryside, peers into picturesque corners and makes a relatively brief, heart-heavy visit to the Majdanek concentration camp a few miles from the medieval city of Lublin. Eisenberg doesn’t delve into the history of the camp (also known as Lublin), but it became a killing center and was instrumental in a 1941 Nazi plan to murder the Jewish population of German-occupied Poland. An estimated 1.7 million Polish Jews were killed during this operation alone. That’s a profound history for any movie to grapple with intelligently, especially one that’s as modest and laugh-laced as “A Real Pain.” Eisenberg, though, deftly handles its weight, in part because it is a given for his characters. The Holocaust doesn’t need to be summarized for David, Benji and the rest of the tour group; they’re in Poland specifically because, in one attenuated way or another, it has been with them all their lives. It’s history, but for David and Benji it is, fundamentally, a history that’s inseparable from the existential reality of their grandmother, from the woman and the mother she became, and from the family that she had. It is, as this gentle movie plaintively suggests, an anguished generational bequest.

Documentary Film Series Ticket Costs:

  • AZJHS Member Ticket: $5.00

  • Non AZJHS Member Ticket: $10.00

  • Tzedakah Giving Circle Member Ticket: $0.00

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