Voyages

Emmanuel Finkiel

 

Emmanuel Finkiel takes an unusual stand on camera angles. "I think there's a lot of emotion in people's backs," he says. "Filming characters from behind helps to free them from their fictional framework." Or as he also puts it: "Ozu's cinematographer once said that to find the truth of a tree, instead of making a wide shot, even with the world's best lighting, it is better to frame a section of branch which encapsulates it all." Which should give some indication of his film's structure, shifting in time and space, telling three intertwined stories that take place in Poland, Paris and Tel Aviv.

Voyages introduces us to three women. Rivka is a 65-year-old French woman living in Israel who joins a group of people on a trip from Warsaw to Auschwitz. Regine is a woman of about the same age who lives alone in Paris and one day receives an unexpected visit from an old man claiming to be her long-lost father. Finally, there's Vera, an 85-year-old Russian woman who has recently emigrated to Israel, looking for a long-lost cousin.

From three seemingly unrelated stories, Finkiel creates a seamless patchwork that inter-relates in the tiniest detail and finally leads us full circle. The apparent contradiction between digression and cohesion was inspired by real-life stories.

"While I was working on the script," says Finkiel, "I tried to recreate the feelings I had years ago when I first heard the incredible tales of these people scattered all over the world but whose lives were intertwined; all these funny old people with quaint accents, cousins and old aunts who'd been separated and spent their time meeting again, or looking for each other or missing each other. Each story was unique, and yet seemed to be part of a whole, single movement, which is why I used a linear narrative style for the three stories." Steve Grayson