‘Treasure’ Review: Lena Dunham Faces Holocaust Trauma Through a Feel-Good Father-Daughter Road Movie

To call Julia von Heinz’ “Treasure” both sympathetic and broadly appealing might well be damning the film with faint praise, but circumstances here force our hand. How else to describe a heartwarming father-daughter road movie that takes as its subject the multi-generational, multi-national trauma of the Holocaust?

What else can one say about a warmly acted, unobtrusively directed peer into Auschwitz that feels most comfortable as a feel-good tearjerker? So if there’s nothing particularly objectionable about the family tale that premiered on Saturday at the Berlin Film Festival, little about it really lingers.

Little, that is, except the premise. Based on a partially autobiographical novel by author Lily Brett, “Treasure” follows a pair of Jewish Americans as they travel through Poland, returning to and reflecting on the site of their own family’s destruction.