FEATURE DOCUMENTARY | COMING SOON
Three generations since the Holocaust, Mima, a 21-year-old American college student, road trips through the hills of northern Romania in search of her grandmother’s village to make sense of the life her family lived for centuries before the Holocaust.
about the film
I Don’t Know What I’m Doing Here is a documentary road trip feature film by director Jacob Pincus. Captured over 10 days, the film follows Madeline “Mima” Kohn (21) on a road trip around northern Transylvania, Romania in search of her Holocaust survivor grandmother’s village. With a Romanian university student as their translator, Pincus (21) captures the trio’s adventures from village to village as they attempt to piece together the life her grandmother and ancestors lived for centuries. The project is currently in post-production.
After the elimination of the majority of Jewish life in Europe during the Holocaust, the destruction seems to be the only thing that’s remembered. However, Eastern Europe was an epicenter of Jewish life for centuries. It laid the foundation of Ashkenazi Jewish heritage and culture. Still, most people have little to no knowledge or reference of centuries of Jewish life in Europe beyond Fiddler On The Roof (1971). Centuries of the Jewish people’s thriving history has largely been reduced to the Jewish people’s weakest moment. Why do we know so little? What can we find? How can we redefine our history?
As a third-generation Holocaust survivor, Mima is grappling with her own identity under the weight of her generational trauma. Compounded by the loss of her late Mother when she was a child, Mima carries many legacies at once. She’s unsure of how to differentiate between her responsibility towards her family and herself as a young woman in the 2020s. With grant money from her university, Mima journeys back to the old country. She dares to find the root of this trauma in an attempt to gain control over it.
I Don’t Know What I’m Doing Here is a film for and by the new-age, creating what Pincus calls “Gen-Z Cinema”. Pincus implores fresh and form bending techniques to create a cinematic language in the style of his generation’s media. Taking inspiration from sources ranging from YouTube travel vlogs, to no-budget DIY-guerilla filmmaking, to Dogma-95, Pincus and his camera become one, allowing the audience to experience the story alongside Mima rather than witnessing from afar.
Using this style, the filmmakers hope for the film to become almost a tutorial ––offering a blueprint on how to take ownership in nurturing identity in an era of hyper-cultural assimilation and digital homogeneity. Through inhabiting Mima and Pincus’ point of view, we hope we share a new way to observe our past and define our present.
donating to this film
Expenses will go towards hiring a co-editor, hiring professional sound designers and color graders, additional production shoot costs, employing a post-production supervisor/co-producer, and film festival fees.
Below is the film’s Pitch Deck where you can find a detailed plan of action for finishing the film and a budget breakdown.
We have raised $68,000 of our $75,000 fundraising goal.
Meet the Filmmakers
Madeline “Mima” Kohn
Protagonist and Executive Producer
Madeline “Mima” Kohn, is an Urban Studies major at the University of Pennsylvania, is passionate about city planning and Jewish history. The youngest of seven children, Mima is the granddaughter of four Holocaust survivors from diverse Jewish backgrounds. She is particularly interested in the histories of Jewish migration and communal identity.
Mima’s exploration of European Jewish history began unexpectedly. She grew up speaking Polish with her babysitter and, at 16, traveled to Poland on a Holocaust education tour. Despite the prevalent view of Poland as unsafe for Jews, Mima felt a connection to the culture and Jewish sites, partly through her language skills. This led her to volunteer at the Jewish Culture Festival in Krakow and, later, work with the Lauder Foundation as a strategic consultant for Jewish communities in Madrid, Sofia, and Helsinki.
Through this work, Mima saw both the resilience of Jewish life in Europe and the lingering shadow of the Holocaust. It made her realize that there was important communal work to be done in the U.S. as well, especially regarding the complex legacies of Jewish history. She began to focus on understanding her own family’s pre-Holocaust history, which, as she discovered, no longer exists in its original form anywhere in the world. Mima’s quest is to uncover and understand the lost origins of her ancestors, whose journey to the U.S was not from a specific place, but from a history that she now seeks to reconstruct.
Her Hebrew name, “Mima,” meaning “aunt” in Yiddish, honors her mother’s aunts who perished in the Holocaust.
Jacob Pincus
Director, Producer, Editor
Jacob Pincus is a filmmaker, artist, and community organizer based in Los Angeles. As founder of Cove Films, executive director of Our Art Fund Inc., and co-founder of Chavurah USC, he balances creative work with community leadership.
Growing up in Pittsburgh and Cleveland, Pincus began his filmmaking journey at 15 with Pincus Pictures, shooting events and promotional videos to fund his filmmaking dreams. His first film, Stronger than Steel (2019), explores the aftermath of the Tree of Life synagogue shooting, and was screened at over 30 film festivals worldwide winning several awards.
During a transformative gap year in Jerusalem at the renowned Shalom Hartman Institute, Pincus immersed himself in Jewish learning while apprenticing with director Amichai Greenberg on The Pool. He also engaged in human rights and peace activism, working with Palestinians and Israelis fighting for freedom for all.
Pincus later attended USC’s School of Cinematic Arts, studying Film and Television Production with a minor in Political Philosophy. After two years, he left to pursue independent filmmaking outside the traditional corporate Hollywood system.
His artistic work explores personal identity within our increasingly homogenous, hyper-saturated media landscape and examines the invisible systems that constrain human freedom and agency. Beyond directing his own projects, Pincus works on movie sets in various production roles and is an assistant producer at New Theater Hollywood, an experimental interdisciplinary black box theater. His commitment to both his craft and community continues to define his artistic journey.
Charlie McCollum
Producer
Charlie McCollum is a producer and director based in New York City. He is a graduate of the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts, where he studied Film Production and English.
At the core of his filmmaking ethos is an emphasis on authentic storytelling executed in forms not seen before. His approach to producing revolves around hands-on collaboration and team building-– taking immense pride in overseeing a project from start to finish through strong partnerships. As a director and writer himself, he is a second set of eyes for creatives to bounce their boldest ideas off of. Recent credits include Idlewild, Sultana, Blue, In The Dark, and music videos for Runner and Miranda Del Sol.
As a descendant of Jewish relatives forced out of Poland during World War II, McCollum is honored to be a part of telling this story. He hopes that the documentary can showcase a broader scope of Jewish history through a modern Jewish-American lens–– uncovering bits and pieces of a communal past that was silenced by atrocity. However, the documentary is just as much about the present and future as it is about the past. Through Mima’s journey, McCollum hopes the third generation can see themselves through her experiences (as well as Pincus’s self-referential and authentic directorial style) as they reflect on their own relationships with their family, faith, and heritage.
Sabrina Greco
Editor
Sabrina Greco is an LA based director and editor. She was born in Yonkers, NY and attended Boston University. As a director, her first feature film “Lockjaw” recently premiered at Slamdance in 2025, while her previous short film “Anthony’s” premiered at Palm Springs Shortfest in 2023. As an editor, she co-edited Eugene Kotlyarenko’s most recent film “The Code” which premiered at Fantasia in 2024 along with various other short films. She continues to write and direct her own work while editing with other filmmakers on their projects.
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