Best movie I've seen in quite some time

Everything is Illuminated, 2005, starring Elijah Wood and Eugene Hutz of Gogol Bordello. I remember seeing the trailers for it around the same time as the Lord of the Rings, but sadly it only came out on one screen in all of Vancouver, for all of about six weeks.

A pity, though, because I enjoyed it very, very much.

Scenario: Jewish American with an odd collecting habit travels to the Ukraine in search of a woman who is believed to have helped his grandfather escape the Nazis during the Holocaust. He travels the countryside in a Trabant with a blind man (the driver of the car), his grandson who learned to speak English from a thesaurus and dresses like a rapper, and Sammy Davis Jr. Jr., a deranged dog dubbed the 'seeing eye bitch'.

The film itself alternated between being hilariously funny and quite somber.

I think one of its main strengths was that there was very little dialogue throughout, and that nothing was spelled out or explained. For the most part, the audience was barred from entering the characters' minds and background information isn't provided. Instead, the film forces you through the same thought process that the characters go through, seeing what they see, interpreting and coming up with your own conclusion as to what happened.

Ultimately history is whatever you choose to believe happened, based upon the best evidence that's available to you at the time. In some cases there are more loose ends than others, and some things you'll never know. But regardless of what you know of history and whether or not you care, you will always be a product of the people and events that happened before you. That's pretty much what I got out of it.

It was also pretty refreshing for a Holocaust film. Seems to me it's the first one that I've seen that didn't take place during the actual Holocaust and so it didn't really deal with it in the same way that practically every other film has. It didn't come across as preachy at all.

Oh, and I liked the soundtrack.