BY KAREN BOSSICK

Leah Warshawski did not set out to do a film about her grandmother’s experience as a Holocaust survivor.

Instead, she and her husband Todd Soliday wanted to make a funny film focusing on her spunky 4-foot-8 immigrant grandmother with her big hair and Sonia-isms stemming from her self-taught English.

“People come just to hang out with her. People bring their kids to meet her because they want them to meet a Holocaust survivor. She’s like the grandmother everyone wishes they had,” Leah Warshawski said.

But husband and wife soon realized that post traumatic stress related to the horrors of Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen and Majdanek concentration camps lay smoldering underneath everything Grandma Sonia said and did.

And, when the then-91-year-old Sonia Warshawski learned she was to be evicted as Kansas City’s once-ritzy Metcalf South shopping center was shuttered, a new question came into focus: How would this woman who has always stayed busy to avoid coming to face to face with the dark parts of her past survive retirement?

Sun Valley Center for the Arts will present “Big Sonia” at 4:30 and 7 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 25, at Magic Lantern Cinemas in Ketchum as part of its 2017-18 Film Series.

The award-winning documentary film—a poignant story of generational trauma and healing-- is part of The Center’s BIG IDEA project “This Land is Whose Land?” which launches this week.

Leah Warshawski and Todd Soliday will be on hand to field questions following both screenings.