Set in Poland during the Nazi occupation, EDGES OF THE LORD is the story of an 11 year old Jewish boy who is trained almost brutally by his father in learning his catechism in order to appear Catholic and thereby survive the Holocaust. Out of the proverbial fire, our ROMEK (Haley Joel Osment) suddenly finds himself in the "frying pan" of a raw and sometimes brutal peasant pig farming community.

"Having had a bad experience directing a movie based upon someone else's screenplay, I decided to make a movie based upon my own work. It has long been my fantasy to write my own screenplay and then eventually turn it into a movie" says the film's writer/director Yurek Bogayevicz. He adds, "My one goal was to write a screenplay set in Poland around the time of second world war, dealing with the children of that time. Somehow I believed that this journey back to the land from where I came would put me in touch with enough childhood material out of which I would shape a screenplay. Looking back on that process I can see that it was very much a Jungian approach to writing a screenplay: trying to decipher a larger whole from bits and pieces of a puzzle."

Bogayevicz continues, "In a sense, almost 25 years after my immigration to the United States, I began to discover the very nature of my origins for the first time. I was born in Poland after the war and grew up among people who conveyed a sense of not completely telling me about their past. The hiding of the experiences by my parents, their friends and society in general, led to some real paradoxes. For example, having grown up in this country where just 10 years earlier three million Polish Jews were murdered, I realized that I had never participated in nor heard a conversation about the very nature of these events. A lot of confusion and shame existed in Poland about so-called Jewish subjects.

"While formulating the characters, defining the locations and pinpointing the various relationships in EDGES OF THE LORD, I plunged into a tremendous amount of research, consisting of documents of children's diaries and memoirs from this period I was writing about.

As there was a political thaw in Poland, and some new material was published, I quickly discovered many shameful as well as some heroic stories of our Polish past. I allowed some of these real events to be absorbed into the mainstream of the story that I was writing. The final screenplay is the story of a few children and their gradual loss of innocence."

Bogayevicz adds, "The screenplay was conceived and created in the office of Braun Entertainment Group, with Zev Braun and Philip Krupp. The scenes were read out loud, discussed and debated, creating a great sense of excitement about the emerging product. Many times we had the impression that our office was populated with these characters. From this story, the characters' behavior and personalities began to bleed into our daily life. The three of us carried the project through many ups and downs all the way to the first day of shooting in Poland on May 1, 2000. EDGES OF THE LORD is the first project to be shot in Poland and written in English by a Pole, starring American actors. But for me - a highly apolitical person - it became a way of dealing with the painful and oftentimes hidden past."

"The experience of making the picture was exhilarating. Prior to the start of production, we spent two weeks conducting a workshop with the kids, explaining to them the nature of this story and the meaning of the characters, and trying to remove all the barriers in preparing them for the acting task. The casting of the remaining characters was also very precise and specific. Many actors were called back a number of times to improvise their characters until the final harmonious ensemble emerged," concludes Bogayevicz.

Philip Krupp recalls a continuing comment that Zev Braun made to him and Bogayevicz during the three years it took to set up EDGES OF THE LORD, "We must be living under a guiding star that has leads us away from disaster toward our ultimate destiny." Braun further explains, "To begin with, the idea of having Haley Joel Osment as our little Jewish boy was nothing short of an angel descended from heaven. After problems occurred with two other choices for the Priest, the heavens opened again and presented us with Willem Dafoe.

Finally, another beatific vision appeared on the scene, when Avi Lerner said the magic word "yes," a word so unfamiliar to us it almost needed translation!"

The filmmakers feel that the culmination of this film validated everyone's hard work and unshakable belief in this unique but universal story.