Tsili

U.S. Premiere

Q&A with Amos Gitai at both screenings

Of his 1982 book Tzili: The Story of a Life, the Romanian-Israeli novelist and survivor Aharon Appelfeld told Philip Roth: “The reality of the Holocaust surpassed any imagination. If I remained true to the facts, no one would believe me. But the moment I chose a girl, a little older than I was at that time, I removed ‘the story of my life’ from the mighty grip of memory and gave it over to the creative laboratory.” This adaptation of Appelfeld’s powerful book gives fresh intimacy and urgency to the story of a young Jewish woman hiding in the Ukrainian forests south of Chernivitsi, her world and family having been ripped away, and her subsequent wandering and search for meaning following the war.

Screening with:

Back to the Soil
Bill Morrison, USA, 2014, 18m
Experimental filmmaker Bill Morrison has spent his 20-year career recovering and reassembling decaying bits of archival film footage into new works, with results that range from haunting to kaleidoscopic. In his new 18-minute film Back to the Soil, the source material is 1,000 feet of 16mm film shot by Morrison's grandfather in 1927, documenting an era when the Soviet government offered over 2.5 million acres of farmland in the Ukraine, Belarus, and Crimea to former merchants whose work had been outlawed under Communist rule.