Roman Vishniac from his early years in tsarist Russia to his emergence as a modernist photographer in Weimar Berlin, his journeys across Eastern Europe before the war, and his family’s dramatic escape to America in 1940. After the war, Vishniac’s documentation continued with photographs of Berlin in ruins and children in displaced persons camps. Then, in a stunning shift, he turned almost exclusively to scientific photography, where he made considerable contributions in the field of microscopy. His “Living Biology” series, funded by the National Science Foundation, features some of the first films depicting life through a microscope. They became a staple in the 1960s and 1970s in classrooms across the United States. The brilliant artist, however, is best known for his iconic images of Jewish life in Eastern Europe from 1935 and 1938, the last visual records of these communities before they were wiped out.

The film is narrated by Vishniac’s daughter, Mara Kohn Vishniac, who was born in Berlin in 1926. Her clear-eyed view of her father adds to the complexity of a man who was a sometimes unreliable narrator of his own life story. She was his helper in the darkroom and his “alibi” for photographing Nazi propaganda with her posed innocently in front of it. Growing up in her father’s shadow, Mara sought to break free of his grip, only to come around and embrace his legacy. Ultimately, she took responsibility for preserving his diverse and stunning body of work, a haunting eulogy to a world on the brink of destruction.