Voyages

Since Voyages was released in France, director Emmanuel Finkiel has been trying (with little luck) to convince the press that his film is not another testimony about the Holocaust. But he's right. His fictional travelers are old Jews whose lives carry something more deep and intangible than the direct wounds of Nazi atrocities.They represent a sense of loss, a loss of family ties, of a culture and a language whose disappearance is pushed to the background of history by the sounds of the horror and the military epics of the State of Israel. At the same time, this last tale of the Diaspora manages to portray the world as a place where the signs of the camps are visible, not on the arms of the survivors but in the abuse of the weak. For someone like me, raised with no religion but with the music of the Yiddish language in his ears, Voyages is a unique opportunity to connect with a mysterious sense of pre-war wholeness, with an idea of mankind in which the identity of individuals owes nothing to a passport and tradition is not linked to the practice of rites. Finkiel finds something that is not lost but neglected by the evil of banality, by the refusal to see beyond the established truths to which cinema may sometimes, as in this case, be an antidote. (Eduardo 'Quintín' Antin is editor of the Argentinian Al Amante, one of the leading film magazines in Latin America.)