During the Holocaust, a Nazi officer in Białystok, Poland had 20 Jewish painters copy European masterworks that he sold to make himself rich. The painters thought if they did his bidding they would survive.

They didn’t.

Murdered at their easels, in the streets or in concentration camps.

This Copyist workshop produced more than 2,000 paintings, and remained an urban myth. No known painting from that workshop had been found.

Until one was bought for $75 out of the back of a pickup truck in Rockford, Illinois.

Tim Prince and Sarah Thistle discovered what it was.

Tim makes bone sculptures from roadkill, Sarah sells death ephemera. What they did next was incredible. They went to Bialystok and gave it back.

It shows that important stories are not always born in obvious places.

They were people in our own community who looked closer and chose responsibility over profit.

But this is not a film ONLY about world war II.

It is also about he strange human threads connecting Rockford and Białystok: oddities, faith, doubt, punk rock, memory, prejudice, repair, and the question of what we do when history lands in our hands.

For more than a decade, Our City, Our Story has been teaching me how to do this kind of work: to look closely at a place, find the people others might overlook, and tell stories that make the familiar impossible to ignore.

That is the same muscle if what I am bringing to this film.

Currently in Bialystok filming the conservation process until the beginning of September. In September and October, Our City, Our Story episodes are going to be in production..