Passionate, joyful, fascinating, and totally delightful.
Anyone who has watched the films of Woody Allen, or seen any New York-based Jewish comedy, knows some words of Yiddish like schmuck or schmutter. But that is often where our knowledge of it ends. The language of Eastern European Jewish people has often been considered a dying language. This joyful documentary seeks to redress that image, and reassert that Yiddish is alive and well and living in the diaspora.
Renowned documentary filmmaker and theatre director Ros Horin looks at Yiddish as a contemporary language and vibrant tool for art-making. Horin follows theatre royalty Barrie Kosky as he mounts his final production for the Komische Oper Berlin: an audacious Catskills-style review in Yiddish. She also brings us into preparations for Yiddish Summer Weimar, a two week festival of Yiddish culture, held in a city which is currently experiencing a resurgence of right-wing antisemitism. We also see rehearsals of Australian writer-director Gary Abrahams’s adaptation of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Yentl. Music is very much to the fore in the, not just preservation, but development of Yiddish, and the film includes work from Daniel Khan and Simon Starr’s Yiddish punk big-band YID!
But this work is not just a love-letter to Yiddish words and music. It is also a fascinating exploration of the importance of a language to a culture and a people. As Tomi Kalinski says, Inuit might have umpteen words for snow, but Yiddish has umpteen words for “loser”.
Welcome to Yiddishland is about language, and music, and literature, and culture. And in that sense it is about politics. But this is no polemic. With its subtitle A Place With No Borders, it demonstrates how a language which was never that of a nation-state, can bring together people of myriad nation-states, as well as the stateless. And it does so with unrestrained joy.
This is a documentary which delivers information, surprise, delight, passion, and humour, whilst provoking thought. Beautifully directed by Horin, and put together by master editor Steven Robinson, this film is as satisfying as a full Shabbat dinner.
Mazel tov!
Welcome to Yiddishland will screen at the Jewish International Film Festival with a theatrical release to follow.
Click here to book tickets.
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