In search of ladino + Yiddish

Yiddish

Seven young people share their love for Yiddish avant-garde poetry written during the interwar period – a period which saw a huge outbreak of Yiddish culture and creativity.
The poetry written was both personal and universal, closely aligned with the art movements of the time. The seven participants in the film, some of them jewish and some not, move and live between different countries and languages.
Each tells of their connection to Yiddish and to a poet or poetess close to their heart. For them, this poetry does not only belong to the jewish past but speaks to the present

Yols Cutler and his puppets (Kotlers Marionetn)

Joseph Burstyn (productor), EUA, 1935, 18 min. Premiere in Spain.

This short film is a performance by the puppets of Yosl Cutler, a poet, writer and puppeteer trained in the Yiddish theater tradition, as well as a cartoonist for the communist daily The Morgen Freiheit.

In search of ladino

This unique cinematic piece about language, memory and identity follows Ladino speakers—their culture, their memories and their hopes for the future of their mother tongue. In Search of Ladino is a forgotten landmark of Holocaust cinematography, one of the first films to show Ladino speaking Holocaust survivors in Israel and to document their testimonies and songs. The film was meant to be part of a trilogy about languages—Hebrew, Yiddish and Ladino—but David Perlov never managed to make the other two. Perlov avoids being didactic. Focusing his gaze on the faces of his subjects and listening carefully to their stories and songs, he creates a film that brings the richness and diversity of Ladino culture back to life.

Presentation by Emili Boix-Fuster (Linguapax)

Screening in collaboration with Linguapax