TO SPEAK THE UNSPEAKABLE – THE MESSAGE OF ELIE WIESEL
Mondani a mondhatatlant – Elie Wiesel üzenete
France | 1996 | 105 min | col.
This is at once a travel film and a memoir. Judit Elek accompanies the famous writer and essayist Elie Wiesel on a journey to Sziget, the village from which, as a child, he was deported to a concentration camp. Images of this journey and meetings alternate with archival pictures that create a sort of sad countersong to Wiesel’s story – literary, poetic, and melancholy in certain passages, but harsh and harrowed in others. The film becomes a form of writing, a ‘novel’ in which Wiesel is both character and author. A novel in which words blend in the images, the writer’s face, his gaze, his countenances, his silence: and yet, that face speaks. As always in Judit Elek’s cinema, the face becomes the centre attracting the camera eye as the heart of the mystery that her cinema cannot cease to explore. (d.d.)
Local Time
- Timezone: America/New_York
- Date: 07 Nov 2024
- Time: 9:00
Location
- Cinema Astra - Piazza Cesare Beccaria, 9 50121 Florence (FI)
Organizer
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Judit Elek
Judit Elek (born 10 November 1937) is a Hungarian film director and screenwriter. She directed 16 films. As a child, Judit survived the Second World War first in a sheltered house on Pozsonyi Street, Budapest, and then in the ghetto (November 1944 – January 1945). From 1956 to 1961, she studied at the University of Theatre and Film Arts in Budapest, in the class of film director Félix Máriássy. Her classmates included Pál Gábor, Imre Gyöngyössy, Zoltán Huszárik, Ferenc Kardos, Zsolt Kézdi-Kovács, János Rózsa, Éva Singer and István Szabó. During this time she was a founding member of the Balázs Béla Studio, a workshop for experimental film. In 1968, Elek made her first feature film, Sziget a szárazföldön (The Lady from Constantinople). From the 1980s onwards, she made historical films such as The Trial of Martinovics and the Hungarian Jacobins (1980). In the 1990s, she shot films with a Jewish theme like Tutajosok (Memories of a River, 1990) and To speak the Unspeakable: The Message of Elie Wiesel (1996).
