To Speak the Unspeakable – The Message of Elie Wiesel

Judit Elek’s final, more widely internationally recognised film (as well as her last to be screened in its day at IFFR) is a documentary journey with writer/activist/academic Elie Wiesel. It explores several key places from his past including his hometown, Sighet, then and now Romanian but between 1940 and 1944 ruled by Hungary, and Oświęcim, infamous under its German name Auschwitz, where Wiesel survived the horrors of Nazi death camps. In Sighet, he meets people who still remember the last vestiges of the old Jewish culture young Elie was raised in, including an elderly man who turns out to be the brother of the Wiesel family’s doctor.

Memories abound in Auschwitz, where Wiesel speaks about what is deemed unspeakable. The journey is framed by two speeches he gave: one at the inauguration of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and another upon receiving his Nobel Peace Price in 1986. These moments are interspersed with choice historical film materials.

It’s difficult not to see the path of To Speak the Unspeakable – The Message of Elie Wiesel, as well as the film’s fragmented form, as something of a model that would influence the themes and structures of Elek’s 2019 film, Retrace (digital director’s cut).

– Olaf Möller

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