INDEPENDENT FILM FOR INDEPENDENT MINDS

When we first meet Adam Stein (Jeff Goldblum), it is 1961, and he's making a return trip to the Seizling Institute, an asylum in the Israeli desert. As it happens, this particular Institute specializes in Holocaust survivors, endeavoring to help those scarred by the Nazi gulags and Death Camps during World War II. Adam is the asylum's star resident. He's been in and out, and a cure it seems, is simply out of his grasp. He's a fast talker, a man with special gifts which allow him to read people and manipulate his own body to a disturbingly inhuman degree. He is also incredibly unstable and unpredictable, spending his days grifting fellow residents and playing roles which range from financial advisor to messiah. Adam's tragic past, his pre-war days as a musician, entertainer, impresario, and magician, and his life at the hands of a cruel SS Commandant (Willem Dafoe) during the war, slowly unfurl as Adam's mind falls apart. The key to Adam's resurrection may rest in another resident of the Institute with a problem very similar to his own.