Film Screening: "Big Sonia"

Tying in with the current exhibition of Lest We Forget by Luigi Toscano at the Memorial Courtyard at the National WWI Museum and Memorial, Goethe Pop Up Kansas City presents a special screening of the documentary film “Big Sonia.”

The documentary’s subject, Sonia Warshawski (Big Sonia), is one of the last remaining Holocaust survivors in Kansas City and is one of seven local survivors included in the current installation of LEST WE FORGET. Big Sonia examines the life – past and present – of this remarkable survivor and public speaker.

Both Sonia’s daughter, Regina Kort, and Luigi Toscano will be present at the screening to answer the audience’s questions and discuss the similar themes shared by these individual projects.

Admission is free and open to the public.

Film Trailer: https://vimeo.com/118698054

“Big Sonia”
United States, 2016, 91 min
Directors: Leah Warshawski, Todd Soliday

For years, Sonia Warshawski has been an inspirational public speaker at schools, churches and prisons, where her stories of surviving the Holocaust as a teenager have inspired countless students, prisoners, and ex-cons who once felt their own traumas would leave them broken forever. But when Sonia is served an eviction notice for her iconic tailor shop, which has thrived in the bottom of a now-abandoned mall for 35 years, she is confronted with an agonizing decision: either open up a new shop – at age 90 – or retire. For a woman who admits that she stays busy “to keep the dark parts away”, facing retirement dredges up fears she’d long forgot she had, and her traumatic personal past resurfaces. Following Sonia as she continues on the motivational speaker circuit (even as she navigates her own struggles), Big Sonia explores what it means to be a survivor. Will you let your trauma define you? Or will your past make you stronger?

Photo (detail): © Gloria Baker Feinstein