I made a documentary in 2019 titled 'Cheating Hitler: Surviving The Holocaust,' which followed the stories of three child survivors of the Holocaust, and that's where I first came across Maxwell's extraordinary story of surviving in the woods for a year in Eastern Poland. It struck me as very cinematic: the mythical landscape of the woods, the trauma of what this boy was enduring, and the fact that he was a young artist. All those elements reminded me of a Grimms' fairy tale and it felt like a new and unique way to tell a true Holocaust story.
I was particularly interested in how the artistic mind of this boy was being shaped by his traumatic experiences and how he used his art as an outlet for the pain and grief. Max is an abstract expressionist, which is an artistic movement that came out of war-torn Europe in the '40s, and this was something I was interested in exploring. How did this artistic boy who was robbed of a normal childhood, how did he take his pain and turn it into something beautiful and creative?
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