After All the Dead Sing Again...
Concert documentary about a performance of Chasidic songs by composer Max/Miksa/Mihai Eisikovits.
72'
Hungary
IFFR 2023
Judit Elek’s oeuvre doesn’t consist of films alone. There are also some books – not many, but all of great importance and value. An early novella aside, these books are usually documentation that provide the historical materials several of her main works are based on, above all the trial against Ignác Martinovics in The Trial of Martinovics and the Hungarian Jacobins (1981), and the so-called Tiszaeszlár Affair in Memories of a River (1989).
With the concert documentary After All the Dead Sing Again... matters are the other way around. The film sums up the results of a massive endeavour in historical restoration and reconstruction, then recording Elek became engaged with: that of the Chasidic songs Hungarian/Romanian composer Max/Miksa/Mihai Eisikovits wrote down in 1938-39 – purely phonetically, without knowing either Yiddish or Hebrew or Aramaic. Elek also published a massive tome with translations of the songs, including into English. The film moreover harks back to To Speak the Unspeakable – The Message of Elie Wiesel (1996), tying one more knot into the massive weave that are her films – a tapestry of the 20th century as witnessed and remembered from an angle most particular and unique.
– Olaf Möller
IFFR 2023
Programme IFFR 2023
Judit Elek (1937) is among world cinema’s most uncompromising figures. Beloved by IFFR founder Huub Bals, yet to this day little known in wider circles, Elek made both fiction and documentary films that are almost brutally personal, reflecting as much the history of her native Hungary as her own trauma-riddled life. International Film Festival Rotterdam is honoured to present the most complete retrospective so far of an auteur whose works and wisdom are needed today as urgently as ever.
Read more about this programmeConcert documentary about a performance of Chasidic songs by composer Max/Miksa/Mihai Eisikovits.
72'
Hungary
IFFR 2023
Film à clef of Judit Elek's teenage years in 1950s Budapest, between Stalinist rule and first longings.
110'
Hungary
IFFR 2023
Part two of Judit Elek’s Istenmezején documentary, where relationships with locals get both tighter and more ambivalent.
104'
Hungary
IFFR 2023