This beautifully shot film tells the story of Thessaloniki—or what used to be Thessaloniki. The second-largest city in Greece was, for four hundred years, a hub of Jewish life in Europe, home to Sephardic Jews exiled from Spain in the late fifteenth century. It went by the name of Salonica and its primary language was Spanish. Then in World War II nearly all Jews were deported or killed. Impressionistic rather than didactic, Salonica tells a difficult history while avoiding the Holocaust film cliché. Gathering the modern-day stories of, among others, an Eastern Bloc woman now caring for an elderly Jewish survivor, a Greek nationalist photographer, and an American student researching Thessaloniki, and his own history, the film paints a portrait of a city shadowed by absence. The storytelling succeeds to a point where one can feel not only the city that survives today, but also the one that has been lost.  AK