There are many powerful movies about the Jewish Holocaust. That is why Larry Weinstein, Rhombus Media's acclaimed director and producer, believed he need not add to the lengthy mix.

Weinstein changed his mind after reading "Hana's Suitcase," Karen Levine's 2002 non-fiction bestseller about a Czech girl who perished in Auschwitz.

"When I read Karen's book and saw how beautiful its message of hope and tolerance was, I knew I had to make this movie," says Weinstein.

Rolling into theatres this weekend, "Inside Hana's Suitcase" is an absorbing detective story.

The mystery begins as a battered suitcase marked with the name Hana Brady arrives at the Tokyo Holocaust Centre.

The relic's arrival deeply affects school teacher Fumiko Ishioka, the centre's director, and her young Japanese pupils.

Stirred by the haunting past, Fumiko sets out to discover the details of Hana's life.

"Right from the start I imagined Fumiko staring down at the drawing by Hana and seeing it come to life, telling her all the things that Hana was thinking," says Weinstein. "It seemed the perfect way to lure audiences into Hana's past and the lives of the people who resurrect it."

A tenacious sleuth, Fumiko discovers the existence of Hana's brother, George Brady, in Toronto.

Through Brady, Fumiko learns that as small children, Hana and George had been incarcerated after the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia in 1939.

The siblings were sent to the Theresienstadt (Terezin) prison camp.

In 1944, Hana was transferred to the concentration camp at Auschwitz. The 13-year-old girl was killed in a gas chamber a few hours after she arrived on October 23, 1944.

George survived his imprisonment by working as a labourer.

"Fumiko was actually quite brilliant," says Weinstein. "She knew she could make the Holocaust more immediate to her pupils if she found a relic that belonged to a child roughly the same age as these kids."

One of the film's most powerful moments comes when a young student looks at the suitcase and realizes that she, too, could have died in the camps.

"In that instant this girl realizes this terrible stuff could have happened to her under different circumstances," says Weinstein.

Much of the dialogue is taken directly from Levine's book, which is now in its 24th printing.

Read by millions of school-age children, youngsters around the world have written to Hana as if she were alive.

"Hana's story connected with kids, as did her spirit," says Weinstein. "They may have known abuse or had a parent taken away from them. It didn't matter if Hana's story was long ago. It made its mark on these kids' hearts."

Like Weinstein's earlier films ("Ravel's Brain," (2001), "The Music of Kurt Weill: September Songs" (1995), gorgeous music helps tell Hana's story. Look for a superb score by Alexina Louie and Alex Pauk.

The film also includes a piece by Czech composer Martinu and one by Karl Amadeus Hartman, the only anti-Hitler composer who lived and worked in Hitler's Germany.

The movie's biggest impact, however, comes through the Canadian, Czech and Japanese schoolchildren who narrate Hana's story.

"This was wonderful to me to see so many faces and different ethnicities," Brady, 81, told CTV.ca.

"These memories for me are not easy to relive. But, the message to take away is that we have to get along. We have to respect the differences in every nationality."

As Weinstein says, "After 9/11 we should have opened up and tried to understand other cultures. We did the opposite. The world is anti-Jew, anti-Christian, anti-Muslim. If my film does some small part to stop this I'm happy."