My Friend Sam

An up-lifting, intergenerational testament to a life reclaimed, moral inheritance, and humble generosity unwinds 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 encampment 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 distinguished 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 bring forward survival not only as an act of endurance but as daily empathy in action.

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Executive Producer: Jay Ruderman

Release date: 2026

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