Arik Shraga
the Family Storyteller
“For more than a decade, I have been documenting families — so their stories don’t have to stay only in memory.”
Hi, my name is Arik Shraga. I’m a documentary photographer and filmmaker, and the person behind Film a Family.
I began working as a documentary photographer in 2008, after studying photojournalism in St. Petersburg.
From the beginning, I was drawn to personal narratives. My early projects included a story about a man adopting a child from a mental institution and a long-term documentary about the last residents of disappearing villages in the Russian North.
After moving to Israel in 2011, I discovered that much of my own family had perished in the Holocaust. That realization led me to photograph and interview Holocaust survivors, preserving faces and testimonies that could easily have disappeared with time.
Since 2013, I have worked with humanitarian organizations, documenting people and families across Israel, the former USSR, and Eastern Europe. Over the years, I have been welcomed with my camera into thousands of homes, listening to stories of love, displacement, survival, parenthood, grief, and hope.
Again and again, I saw how much can live inside one person’s memory — and how easily it can disappear if no one takes the time to record it. Eventually, I realized I had been preserving other people’s family stories while my own were just as fragile.
So I began recording my relatives’ memories. I made a film about my grandparents’ experience during World War II, then a posthumous film about my father, which required years of research. Since 2020, I have also filmed annual interviews with my children, creating a time capsule of their growth.
For more than a decade, I have been documenting families — helping people turn memory into something their children and grandchildren can hear, see, and hold on to.
