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 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
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