The festival will include at this edition a selection of films made by Ian Buruma, one of the most respected historians in the world, who will join us between the 16th and the 22nd of March and will be present at a series of screening and debates.
Ian Buruma’s selection is extremely relevant to his intellectual pursuits. On the one hand, “Terminus", the documentary-short made by famous British filmmaker John Schlesinger, reflects his interest in cinema and his affinities –- some of a familial nature, as Schlesinger’s nephew –- with this medium. In fact, Buruma studied Japanese cinema at a Tokyo university and has written numerous essays and articles on film for some of the most esteemed publications in the world, several of which were included in his excellent collection published in 2014, “Theater of Cruelty: Art, Film, and the Shadows of War”.
Our guest is primarily known in Romania for two of his books, translated and published by Humanitas: “Year Zero: A History of 1945” and “Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of its Enemies” (co-written with Avishai Margalit). Hence, Ian Buruma will also be meeting his readers and fans for an autograph session on the 17th of March at 17:00 at Humanitas Cișmigiu. Journalist Cătălin Ștefănescu will also be attending the event on Sunday.
Two of the films included in this section, the pivotal are related to Buruma’s preoccupation with the effects of Nazism and of other forms of fascism and authoritarianism on the fate of the world in the last century. While Péter Forgács’s film “The Maelstrom: A Family Chronicle," about a family of Dutch Jews decimated by the Nazi Holocaust during World War II, is indicative of Buruma’s Dutch heritage and its echoes spread through several more of his works, such as “Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance.”
FILMS OF THE SECTION
The four documentary masterpieces Ian Buruma will present in Bucahrest are: “Terminus” (1961), by John Schlesinger, “The Sorrow and the Pity” by Max Ophüls “The Maelstrom: A Family Chronicle” (1997), by Péter Forgács and “The Last of the Unjust” (2013), by Claude Lanzmann.
”Terminus” launched the career of one of the most famous British filmmakers of the ‘60s and ‘70s, John Schlesinger, who directed some of the landmark movies of the era, such as “Darling”, “Midnight Cowboy” and “Sunday Bloody Sunday”. This short documentary, commissioned by British Transport Films, follows a regular day in one of London’s biggest stations (Waterloo), where, for a brief moment, the lives of thousands of people converge, only to most likely never meet again. After the film screening on Thursday 21st of March, at POINT, Ian Buruma will be discussing his life and career, starting from the relationship he had with his uncle John Schlesinger.
“Workers have always put up more of a fight. But the bourgeoisie were scared. They had plenty more to lose.”, professes an old man in ”The Sorrow and the Pity,” Marcel Ophüls’ documentary about France’s collaborationist past during World War II. Composed of present-day interviews and archive footage from newsreels and propaganda movies, and originally made for television in 1969, Ophüls’ film was banned by Gaullist censors, who feared it would shatter the myth of France’s patriotic resistance against the Nazis. After the screening on Sunday the 17th of March, Ian Buruma and Radu Jude will be discussing history and cinema in the Atrium of The French Institute in Bucharest. The discussion will be mediated by historian Adrian Cioflâncă.
Filmed in 1975, but only edited and launched in 2013, ”The Last of the Unjust” focuses on Benjamin Murmelstein, the head-rabbi of Vienna before the beginning of World War II, who was subsequently deported to Theresienstadt and who, along with the head-rabbi of Berlin, Paul Eppstein, and that of Prague, Jacob Edelstein, was put in charge of the Jewish Council (Judenrat) in this “model” ghetto. On Wednesday, the 20th of March, at Pavilion 32 – Goethe Institute, we invite you after the screening to a discussion between Ian Buruma and Iulia Popovici, which will recount and pay homage to Claude Lanzmann’s career, one of the most important documentary filmmakers in history.
In “The Maelstrom”, Péter Forgács depicts the everyday life of a family of Dutch Jews, which was almost completely shattered during the Nazi Holocaust of World War II. Using the video diary kept in the ‘30s and ‘40s by Max Peereboom, one of the family members, as a starting point, the film includes sequential moments of happiness and of relaxation that are exclusively explained or introduced with the support of inserts and recomposed sounds, rendering the level of dramatic tension non-existent from a visual perspective. Director Péter Forgács will join Ian Buruma for a discussion after the screening on Tuesday the 19th of March, at Cinema Elvire Popesco.
The presence of Ian Buruma at Bucharest is supported by The Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands and Humanitas Publishing House.
