MINNESOTA PREMIERE

TCJFF’s Gen Z Onscreen Night spotlights a new generation turning the camera on their own lives—using bold, personal storytelling to wrestle with identity, memory, and the questions they’ve inherited. This year’s selection follows an American college student searching rural Romania for traces of her grandmother’s early life, armed with little more than unmarked photographs and a single recording—a portrait of what it means to come of age Jewish and unmoored from your own history.

Mima, an American college student, sets out for the rural Romanian village where her grandmother Esther was born. Along for the journey are her friend Jacob, a recent film-school dropout, and an 18-year-old translator they found on Facebook. Armed with unmarked family photographs and a recorded oral history, the unlikely trio scales walls, crosses fields, and searches for traces of Esther’s life before the Holocaust. But as the deeper questions behind Mima’s journey begin to surface, the search becomes less about recovering a lost past than reckoning with what cannot be recovered. What does it mean to inherit a history you never experienced? How do you make meaning from photographs, stories, silences, and places that no longer remember you?

Raw, funny, searching, and defiantly handmade, I Don’t Know What I’m Doing Here captures the particular disorientation of being young in the 2020s—a punk-rock response to media saturation, disconnection from the past, and the pressure to somehow figure out what to do with the stories we’ve been given.

This screening will be preceded by a cocktail and mocktail hour for young adults at 6:00 PM in the bar at Emagine Willow Creek. To RSVP, email Risa Cohen.

This film is presented in partnership with YALA and the Jewish Community Relations Council of Minnesota and the Dakotas. Use promo code JCRC for 20% off tickets.