“My love letter to Poland”: Jesse Eisenberg’s Oscar-tipped A Real Pain premieres in Warsaw

A Real Pain, a new movie by Hollywood star Jesse Eisenberg filmed entirely in Poland, has had its premiere in Warsaw. The director says that the film, which is being tipped as an Oscar contender, is a “love letter to Poland”, the country from which his ancestors hailed.

Eisenberg wrote and directed A Real Pain and also stars in it alongside Kieran Culkin. The pair play American cousins whose grandmother, a Jewish Holocaust survivor, has recently died, prompting them to embark on a tour of Poland, where she came from.

The film, which opened in the US at the start of this month, has already won rave reviews and yesterday premiered in Poland at a screening held in the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews during the opening of the 22nd Warsaw Jewish Film Festival.

“I have such a wonderful feeling here. My family is from here,” Eisenberg told broadcaster Polsat at the premiere, which he attended alongside Culkin. Earlier this year, the star revealed that he has applied for Polish citizenship.

“Obviously, things have turned out so badly, with Jews in Poland and the war, but my experience of coming back here eighty years later has been amazing,” the filmmaker told Polsat.

While Poland once had Europe’s largest Jewish population, numbering over three million before World War Two, around 85% were killed during the Holocaust and many others fled in the postwar period. There are now only 15,700 people who identify as Jews in Poland, according to the 2021 census.

Eisenberg noted that many of A Real Pain’s filming locations are connected to his family history, such as the town of Krasnystaw, where his great-grandmother came from. Last week, the town council of Krasnystaw awarded the filmmaker honorary citizenship of the town.

The mayor, Daniel Miciuła, noted that Eisenberg had first visited in 2007 while exploring his family roots, then returned last year to film A Real Pain. He thanked Eisenberg for “promoting Krasnystaw around the world”.

One scene in the movie was even filmed at an apartment that his family fled from. Other parts were shot in the former German-Nazi concentration and extermination camp of Majdanek in Lublin and at the Warsaw Uprising memorial.

Daniel Tilles

Daniel Tilles is editor-in-chief of Notes from Poland. He has written on Polish affairs for a wide range of publications, including Foreign Policy, POLITICO Europe, EUobserver and Dziennik Gazeta Prawna.