Filmed over 30 years, Caroline Kaye’s intimate documentary Left Lane Straight begins with a teenager's search through her family’s unusual history and morphs over time into an adult’s examination of the intersection of family and history, and identity reimagined.
Kaye thought she knew her Nona’s story: In 1943, an unmarried Carolina Varon fled the port city of Kavala to her fiance in the relative safety of southern Greece. One month later, Bulgarian soldiers rounded up the entire Jewish population of northeastern Greece and sent them to their deaths. The film sets the stage for WWII, the Holocaust, and its aftermath for a part of the world whose story has largely been untold.
While the film uses historical experts to help contextualize the geopolitical complexity of the Balkans and the era, the beauty of Left Lane Straight lies in the intimate moments we see in Nona Carolina’s kitchen. Stories of massacres and escapes and harrowing choices are told over morning toast and while brushing oil onto thin sheets of phyllo dough.
These revealing interviews from the late 1990s set Kaye on a journey of discovery through the next two decades. As she digs through family footage, explores often scant historical records, and attempts to fill in gaps with her own art, Kaye begins to understand that her family’s identity was degraded in phases—through war and nationalism—culminating in their culture’s near erasure during the Holocaust. She ultimately realizes that heroes can be obscured, heritage can be misunderstood and freedom often comes at a price.
Spanning multiple exiles and migrations—from medieval Spain to 1970s New York—the Alhanati family attempts again and again to define what it means to belong and how to find home.