Outcasts – A Love Story

Produced with the participation of OMNI Television and based on the acclaimed book by Susan Papp (Dundurn Press, 2009), Outcasts – A Love Story is a deeply moving 60-minute documentary that explores the power of love in the face of unimaginable choices.

Directed by Susan Papp and written by Allen Abel, this film tells the real-life story of a man and a woman who fell in love during one of the darkest chapters in European history — World War II. Torn apart by war, fear, and moral conflict, their brief but profound relationship echoes across generations through the voices of the brothers they left behind.

Filmed in the hauntingly beautiful landscapes of Central Europe — where Hungary, Ukraine, and Slovakia meet — the film weaves dramatic re-enactments with an emotional present-day journey. Two elderly friends, one from Canada and one from Israel, return to the town of Nagyszőllős, “the City of Wine,” to revisit the past and uncover long-buried truths.

Outcasts – A Love Story is both intimate and universal: a story of guilt and redemption, of silence and memory, and of the lives that Canadian immigrants carried with them — and those they had to leave behind.

“If she would have gone with Tibor, she couldn’t live with herself… How would I be able to save myself and not the rest of my family?” — Yitzhak Livnat

“In those days, doing what he was doing, it could have got him a bullet. Not one, but maybe half a dozen.” — Bill Aykler