A Little Family Conversation
18
JULY
2012
I started this film with a small movie camera for tourist. A gift from my American great aunt. We bought it together down the street from her house, "on the condition: that I didn't do just any old thing."
As I began filming my family, I felt a need to preserve a trace of this world of mine, that seemed to be slipping away between my fingers…It was a little Jewish world, and it was fading fast. (As little worlds do).
I imagine I wanted to make a link between two separate worlds: mine, as an actress in Paris, and my family's, as proletarian emigrant Polish Jews.
The emigrant's dilemma is that one suffocates inside one's family, whereas outside, it's exile.
For seven years, I filmed my family of Jewish tailors, whose children have all married Blacks, Belgians and Arabs; and little by little I found the money to lift this "room movie" out of its strictly familial condition. It became a film and today I realise the nature of the film I made.
To what extent have my generation and myself been intimately affected by the burden of "History".
And that the strong tradition of open-mindedness that was conveyed to us, and that was forged during this same history of Jewish prosecution, carry with it a contradiction that will lead (… no doubt) to a break with the Jewish identity.
My film centres on this break – chaotic, slow, full of snags – and on the vestiges of this identity.
"Will anything remain of all that? Should something remain of all that? And what is "all that"?"
Hélène Lapiower
| Speaker | Location |
|---|---|
|
François MARGOLIN Hélène LAPIOWER (réalisatrice / film director) |
Auditorium |