The 2025 Toronto International Film Festival witnessed a moment that transcended cinema. At the North American premiere of her directorial debut, Eleanor the Great, Scarlett Johansson stood before a sold-out audience and delivered a deeply personal tribute to the family members she lost in the Holocaust. As she spoke, her voice trembled — not with performance, but with remembrance.
For an actress known for precision and privacy, the moment was startling in its vulnerability. Johansson revealed that the film’s themes of grief, memory, and inherited trauma were inseparable from her own life — a realization decades in the making.
A Discovery Written in DNA
Johansson’s connection to her Jewish heritage crystallized in 2017 during her appearance on Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates Jr.. There, she learned that her great-uncle, Moishe Schlamberg, and his two children — Zlata and Mandil — perished in the Warsaw Ghetto during the Holocaust.
At TIFF, Johansson explained that discovering their fate reshaped how she understood herself. “A lot of my family history was lost,” she said. “Finding it later in life — it changes your DNA. It changes how you see the world.” She shared that Eleanor the Great was, in part, made for her grandmother, and for the stories that were nearly erased by history.
Her great-grandfather, Saul Schlamberg, immigrated to New York in 1910, selling bananas on Ludlow Street. The family he left behind in Poland did not survive. That silence, Johansson noted, echoed through generations.
A Film About Grief — and Borrowed Memory
Written by Tory Kamen, Eleanor the Great stars June Squibb as Eleanor Morgenstein, a sharp-tongued 95-year-old woman grappling with loss. After the death of her closest friend, Bessie Stern — played by real-life Holocaust survivor Rita Zohar — Eleanor begins attending a Holocaust survivors’ support group.
In her loneliness, Eleanor starts repeating Bessie’s survival stories as if they were her own. The lie grows, not from malice, but from desperation to belong — raising difficult questions about memory, ownership of trauma, and love.
Johansson made a bold choice by casting real Holocaust survivors in the support group scenes, working closely with the USC Shoah Foundation. “It wasn’t optional,” she said. “These stories had to be told by the people who lived them.”
Turning a Premiere into Remembrance
As Johansson closed her remarks, the room fell silent. She dedicated the film to the 1.5 million Jewish children murdered in the Holocaust — including members of her own family. What began as a film premiere became an act of collective memory.
“I hope this film encourages people to ask questions,” she told the audience. “Don’t let the stories die. We are the sum of those who came before us.”
In that moment, Scarlett Johansson wasn’t a movie star or a first-time director. She was a descendant, standing in reverence — ensuring that the ghosts of history were finally seen, heard, and honored.