2026 Field Trip Screening: My Friend Sam

About the Field Trip Screening

We’re thrilled to welcome students from across metro Atlanta for a special field trip to the movies, supporting our mission to educate and inspire through the power of film and meaningful dialogue. This Field Trip Screening is open to students, educators, and general audiences.

Film: My Friend Sam
When: Monday, February 23, 2026 at 11:00 AM
Where: Sandy Springs Performing Arts Center
Special Guests: To be announced

Student Matinee Registration

Schools can register for the student matinee at the Sandy Springs Performing Arts Center by clicking on the registration form below. Please complete all of the information in the form.

• Tickets: $5 ($3 Title 1 Schools)
• Deposit Policy: To secure your registration, 50% of your payment is due 15 days after registering. The remaining 50% will be due 15 days before the screening. Accepted forms of payment will be credit card or check. Note: All sales are final. No refunds will be given.
• For information on classroom streaming opportunities, contact tickets@ajff.org.
• Schools and educators can learn more about the Field Trip Screening by contacting Kaylin Berinhout, Sr. Manager of Education & Community Engagement at kaylin@ajff.org.

About the Film

An up-lifting, intergenerational testament to survival, moral inheritance, and quiet generosity unfolds through the remarkable bond between a Holocaust survivor and young girl who would become a global musical icon. At the center is Samuel Marder, a Romanian-born Jewish violinist whose childhood was crushed by antisemitic violence, forced marches, and imprisonment in a Ukrainian camp before he emerged starving and alone into a displaced persons camp in postwar Germany. After years without even hearing music, his life begins anew through an unlikely return to the violin and a full scholarship at the Manhattan School of Music, allowing him to rebuild his life note by note and forge a renowned musical career.

Decades later in the Bronx, his open door and boundless kindness become the foundation of an immigrant child’s musical education, gifted Regina Spektor, now a globally acclaimed singer-songwriter whose singular voice and poetic lyricism grew out of those early lessons. She reflects on the life-changing influence of Marder and his late wife, pianist Sonia Vargas, who nurtured her artistry without cost or condition.

Now in his nineties, widowed yet indefatigable, Marder begins publicly sharing the long-buried trauma of his Holocaust past alongside Spektor, transforming private memory into living testimony and a powerful mission against prejudice. Intimate interviews, archival photographs, animated memory sequences, and luminous musical passages, reveal survival not only as an act of endurance but as daily empathy in action.