Expired June 18, 2021 1:00 AM
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MAN ON THE BUS follows one woman’s journey through a series of shocking revelations about her family history. As psychologist and filmmaker Eve Ash investigates her parents’ story, she uncovers secrets that upend her life.


Gripping interviews, home movies and archival footage plant notes of suspicion and reveal clues — names in a street directory; old 8mm films; mention of a man on a bus in an old recording. A bombshell follows and Eve’s image of her mother, Martha, a Polish survivor of the Holocaust, is blown apart. 


Martha and Feliks, the man she married towards the end of the war, both lost their entire families in the Holocaust, including their spouses. Feliks had been in the Janowska Concentration Camp death brigade, daily working at the burning of bodies to conceal evidence of mass graves, until he and a small group of fellow prisoners made a heroic escape from the camp after killing their guards. Feliks and Martha emigrated together to Melbourne in 1949, and Feliks became a gentle and loving father, dedicated to the family business. Eve grew up in a prototypical postwar suburb, with all the comforts any child could want, and yet, somehow, she always felt apart from her family in unexplained ways. She always felt “different”. 


After their parents died, Eve and her older sister, Helen, traveled to the Ukraine to uncover details of the horrific pogroms that wiped out their family. Eve had further talks with friends and family in Europe, the USA, and in Australia to find out more about her parents. Martha emerges as a talented artist and devoted wife and mother, but also a flamboyant and flirtatious woman who was bored by suburban life and often said ‘some secrets you must never tell anyone’. Having narrowly escaped execution by the Nazis and losing her mother and husband in horrific circumstances, she made a new life in Melbourne that featured a whirlwind of parties and gaiety, but always hid a deep dark secret: her love affair over fifteen years with a man she met on a bus. 


When a 'doppelgänger' contacts Eve, her life is forever altered, as she uncovers lies, tracks down her mother's young lover and reveals the family secret that led her to rewrite her entire life.

  • Year
    2019
  • Runtime
    84 minutes
  • Language
    English
  • Country
    Australia
  • Premiere
    Palm Beach County
  • Director
    Eve Ash