24/02/2023 - BERLINALE 2023: In their debut film, Leandro Koch and Paloma Schachmann take the viewer on an emotional journey to Eastern Europe in search of Jewish klezmer music

“Culture and language never die; it’s not natural. They were assassinated,” are the observations that director Leandro Koch’s film alter ego makes halfway through The Klezmer Project [+see also:
trailer
interview: Leandro Koch, Paloma Schach…
film profile]. He, an Argentinian from a Jewish background, his fellow countrywoman and co-director Paloma Schachmann and a team of Austrian filmmakers are on a road trip on the border between Ukraine, Romania and Moldova. The area was once a stronghold of Yiddish culture, language and music, and Koch and Schachmann’s debut film, which has had its world premiere in the Encounters section of the 73^rd Berlinale, explores what remains after the catastrophe. They are looking for traces of traditional klezmer music, which may not be found in a thriving Jewish community, but rather in their former neighbours’ traditional folk music.

Within this semi-fictional narrative, Koch plays a version of himself that has settled for filming Jewish weddings in Buenos Aires. Disconnected from his Jewish background, he takes little interest in his heritage or his grandmother’s origin in Bessarabia, where Jews lived amongst Slavs, Germans and other ethnicities. That all changes when he meets clarinettist Paloma, who has taken a special interest in klezmer music. Leandro, trying to impress her, tells her his footage is for a documentary on this musical heritage.

To keep up her interest, he decides that he actually has to put his money where his mouth is and shoot a documentary. After interviewing his grandmother about her past, he starts filming local klezmer bands in Argentina, such as the duo Lerner and Moguilevsky. But while there is a new wave of klezmer music in both of the Americas, the root of it is located in Eastern Europe. This is also where Paloma has disappeared off to, to meet US musician Bob Cohen, who has long studied the history of Yiddish culture in those regions.

To find klezmer bands, and to see Paloma again, Leandro boards a plane and starts his research with the support of Austrian producer Lukas Rinner and his team. While the film suggests that Leandro and his team have trouble fulfilling their contract, since there are no klezmer bands left in the region, in reality, the music played by local bands is exactly that. The last surviving member of the Técsői Banda, Ivan Popovich, and various fiddlers such as Victor Covaci, Dimitru Covaci, Ioan Petre and Nicolae Covaci, are living proof that centuries of living door to door with the Jews have made the cultures and the music blend into one another.

And yet, there is also a doomsday clock hanging over these old men. These are tunes they only know by heart, and the music has no lyrics any more, revealing a widespread dying-out of long-held traditions. Yiddish, its role within Jewish daily life and its demise are also themes that the real-life Koch and Schachmann pick up on between the beautiful musical performances. Their argument is that it was not only genocide that killed culture. With the birth of the Israeli state, shedding the old European traditions became the norm. Not only was Yiddish a reminder of persecution and death; it was also a political stance. The language of housewives, so to speak, was to be replaced by the academic, patriarchal Hebrew.

What makes people a “folk” is a question repeatedly asked. Is it the language? Traditions? Stories? Music? Or all of the above? Or is it a claim to land? The Jews historically never had that claim; they only had their traditions. And as time marches on, the old ways have been forgotten. “There is something bigger than us still here,” Cohen observes. Every culture long gone leaves its traces. With the Eastern European Jews, it is within the music: one just has to know where to look.

The Klezmer Project was produced by Nabis Filmgroup (Austria) and Nevada Cine (Argentina), and is handled internationally by Films Boutique.