Yiddish cinema in Poland was robust during the late 1930s, partly because of its connections to the mainstream Polish film industry. Among the participants were Yitzak and Shaul Goskind, who owned a film laboratory called Sektor. The Goskinds joined with satirists Shimon Dzigan and Israel Schumacher to form a film cooperative of Jewish actors and artists to facilitate the production of Yiddish-language films. Most of the films produced within the cooperative were features; the exception was the documentary Mir kumen on released in the U.S. in 1938 as Children Must Laugh.
The documentary presents the daily life of the young residents at the Medem Sanatorium near Warsaw. The sanatorium is often credited as the producers of the documentary, but it was partly funded by Bund, which was the Jewish socialist party, and it was made through the Goskinds’ film cooperative. During the years 1926-1939, the sanitorium treated almost 10,000 children from poor Jewish families who suffered from tuberculosis. This film was created to help raise money among the international Jewish community for patient treatment. Originally, the prologue consisted of a request for help in the language of whatever country the documentary was shown in.
Respected Polish filmmaker Aleksander Ford was asked to direct the project based on his film Chalutzim, (1933), a scripted documentary shot in Palestine about Jewish immigrants from Poland struggling to settle in a desert environment. Mir kumen on was also scripted, using a loose narrative as a way to organize the nonfiction material. Wanda Wasilewski, who cowrote the script, spent time at the sanitorium speaking with patients. The narrative follows three new residents who are introduced to the facility’s routines, treatments and benefits. No professional actors were used.
The film begins from the perspective of a young boy who is a new resident-patient. Frightened and unsure, he experiences the daily routine of the sanitorium – showers, meals, bedtime – with the reassuring help of the staff and other children. The documentary then opens up to include other activities, such as educational classes, exercises and games as well as the sanitorium’s modern treatment methods.
Typical of documentaries of this era, Mir kumen on does not use sync sound. In lieu of spoken dialogue, songs and an occasional voice-over narration make up the soundtrack. The film relies on Ford’s directorial skills to establish key ideas or major points. Tracking shots of rows of smiling faces tell the viewer that the children are well cared for and happy. A group exercise session in which kids perform calisthenics is intercut with shots of their medical check-ups to suggest the connection between exercise and good health.
Filmed in 1936, Mir kumen on was never released theatrically in Poland because it was censored. Reasons for the censorship vary depending on the source: Judith Goldberg in her book “Laughter Through Tears: The Yiddish Cinema” claimed it was because of a scene in which Jewish kids openly welcomed several gentile children whose fathers were on strike. Other sources suggest it was because anti-Jewish propaganda erroneously declared that the film promoted communism.
Mir kumen on was shown through clandestine arrangements, such as closed-press screenings organized by the producers. Employees at the sanatorium managed to transport a copy of the film to France, where it was shown in Paris, with an introduction by Luis Buñuel. In 1938, the sanatorium’s director Shlomo Galinsky brought the film to America where it premiered in New York at the Continental Theatre, following a successful two-month run of another Yiddish classic, The Dybbuk (1938).
The efforts of the Medem Sanatorium were cut short when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939. Three short years later, the employees and patients were transported to Treblinka, the extermination camp in occupied Poland.
