Berlin Jerusalem

Two women, German Else Lasker-Schüler and Russian Mania Shohat, are each travelling to Jerusalem, a mythical but also very real city that they must confront… Based on the biographies of these two women, one of the first Russian Zionists and a German Expressionist poet, the film moves back and forth between the dim cafés of Berlin in the 1930s and the hills of Jerusalem. Berlin-Jerusalem, or the history of crushed utopias… Here, as with Truffaut, wrote Serge Toubiana, “life consists of pieces that don’t fit together.”

NOTE

In Berlin-Jerusalem, the city [Jerusalem] organizes the narrative: that is where the film’s two heroines want to go, where they meet each other and where the narrative ends. In this film, Jerusalem appears in all its chimerical aspects. It is a mythical city, Else Lasker-Schüler’s poetic city, but also the city of the first Jewish migrants, an Arab city and a contemporary megalopolis. Its appearance in the end and its mirage, which appears from the beginning, bind the entire narrative into parallel layers… Reality erupts into the film as something sudden and lethal, like the gunshots, the explosions, the chaos… A conventional world of ruins is transformed into a convulsive world of violence.

Mikhail Iampolski, in Paul Willemen: The Films of Amos Gitai, 1993

FESTIVALS

• Biennale di Venezia/Mostra d’arte cinematografica 1989 – In competition – Critics’ Award

• Istanbul International Film Festival 1989 – Grand Prix