ODESSA ODESSA
France, Israel 2004 | 96 Min. | 35 mm, OmU
Michale Boganim’s lyrical documentary picks up on the theme of vanishing Jewish culture. The three part film depics a journey from the Ukraine to ‘Little Odessa’ in Brooklyn New York and Ashdod in Israel, where the Jewish émigrés are surprised to discover they are seen as Russians. Through different characters, the film addresses hopes, illusions and dreams of freedom. This journey into time and place is the story of all the diasporas. “All my characters are on a search, an existential search for a possible somewhere else, an idealized elsewhere. They go, they come, but their orbits are anchored to an unreal Odessa. At the same time, those who are in Odessa also live in exile and fantasize about an ideal place: America or Israel. Finally, all of them are wandering permanently, without end. They live with the absence of a place. And this absence becomes an obsessive figure in the film. The opening of the film is done with a system of symbolic figures, the exact memory of the film. It arrives, having already lived the voyage towards which it is taking us. One begins the film with his memories; the remainder – is it his memory, his imagination or his view? All that merges together.” Michale Boganim
Michale Boganim: geboren 1972 in Haifa/Israel, aufgewachsen in Paris. Politologie-Studium an der Sorbonne, Studium der Soziologie, Philosophie und Geschichte in Israel. Filmstudium an der NFTS. Filme: DUST (2002).