Everything Is Illuminated

Jonathan Safran Foer is a young American who collects objects connected to his family's past, mounting them on a wall at home. After his grandmother dies, he receives a photograph of his grandfather standing beside a young Ukrainian woman from the World War II years. Jonathan travels to Ukraine to track down the woman, Augustine, who saved his grandfather from the Nazis in 1942, hoping to learn what became of her and of the village where it happened. Once there, he hires a translator named Alex and Alex's reluctant grandfather as a driver, and the mismatched group sets off across a country that is unfamiliar to all three of them.

The film, released in 2005, is based on Jonathan Safran Foer's novel of the same name. It is the feature directorial debut of Liev Schreiber, who also wrote the screenplay. Elijah Wood plays Jonathan, Eugene Hutz plays Alex, and Boris Leskin plays the grandfather. Made for about 7 million dollars, it took in roughly 4 million worldwide.

On IMDb, the film holds a 7.4 rating from around 61,000 votes, and on TMDB it sits at 7.3 from a much smaller voter base. A film critics' rating of 6.6 from 116 reviews places it below both audience scores.