Everything Is Illuminated is a 2005 American biographical comedy-drama film, written and directed by Liev Schreiber and starring Elijah Wood and Eugene Hütz. It was adapted from the novel of the same name by Jonathan Safran Foer, and was the debut film of Liev Schreiber both as a director and as a screenwriter. Plot Jonathan Safran Foer, a young American Jew, goes on a quest to Ukraine to find the woman, Augustine, who saved his grandfather, Safran Foer, during the Holocaust in a small Ukrainian town called Trachimbrod that was wiped off the map when the Nazis liquidated Eastern European shtetls. His guides, who drive up from Odessa to meet Jonathan as he arrives at the train station in Lviv, are a cranky, seemingly antisemitic grandfather, his wound-up dog named Sammy Davis Jr. Jr., and his enthusiastic grandson, Alex, who constantly chatters with a unique command of English and a passion for American pop culture that keeps the arduous journey lighter. These guides have been escorting wealthy Americans in search of their roots for decades. They are generally not very knowledgeable about the subject of finding Jews, and usually just attempt to scam them by taking them on long journeys. However, after hearing Jonathan's compelling story, they decide they actually want to help him. Along the way in Volhynia, as they travel in search of the shtetl in the region around Lutsk, they have a series of misadventures, many of them humorous and based on the culture shock Jonathan experiences as an American tourist in Ukraine. Traveling through much of rural western Ukraine, the three men eventually find Augustine's sister, Lista. She lives by herself in a house in the midst of a great sunflower field, isolated from technology and from news of the outside world. Lista tells them that Augustine was killed by Nazi soldiers after her father refused to spit on the Torah. And she leads them to the site where the town had been. The next night Alex's grandfather quietly kills himself. Through flashbacks, it was revealed he was Jewish. During the massacre of the Jews of his town in the Holocaust, he was shot and thrown into a mass grave. But hours later, he regained consciousness and crawled out of the pit alive, and managed to survive the war himself by hiding his identity as a Jew. He abandoned this identity permanently, symbolically walking away from