PRESS CONFERENCE
MY SWEET CANARY / THE PEASANT AND THE PRIEST / CANNIBAL ISLAND
On Monday, March 14, 2011 a press conference was held during the 13th Thessaloniki Documentary Festival by the directors Roy Sher (My Sweet Canary), Esther Podemski (The Peasant and the Priest) and Cedric Condom (Cannibal Island).
“Thessaloniki was the ideal place for the International Premiere of our film, not only because of the city’s atmosphere, but also because this is where Rosa Eskenazy, the heroine of our film, lived. When it was chosen as the opening film of the 13th Thessaloniki Documentary Festival we were very excited”, said Roy Sher, director of the film My Sweet Canary which was the opening film of the 13th edition. For the director, everything began when he heard rebetica songs in a club in Jerusalem. Later, when he came to Greece and bought a cd with songs by Rosa Eskenazy, the music seemed “difficult” to him, as happens “to everyone coming from a western musical tradition”, as he said. “The first temptation for me was her Jewish name, and later I discovered her biography and the common thread that connected her with Greece, Turkey and Israel”. He explained that he had about 500 of Rosa Eskenazy’s songs in the beginning and nothing else. He then found archival material from ERT (State Greek TV), and a private collection. “The lack of archival material forced us to find an imaginative way to tell the story of this cosmopolitan Turkish-Jewish woman. So I thought of asking three musicians from Greece, Turkey and Israel to make a musical journey following the footsteps of the best-known and loved rebetica singer in Greece”, he explained. Rosa Eskenazy emigrated from Thessaloniki to the USA, where she did well with her songs, but when she returned to Greece her life was particularly difficult. “She was a Cinderella who broke down. There may have been singers with better voices, but in her voice you can hear her entire past”, the director concluded.
Esther Podemski’s film The Peasant and the Priest takes a dive into the past through a 14th century mural by Ambrosio Lorenzeti, which is essentially an allegory of good and bad governing. The two heroes of the documentary were born and died in the 20th century, in Tuscany, in the same year, without ever having met. They are 55-year old Sergio, the last peasant in Tuscany who never left his birth place, and father Oreste, a catholic cleric who cared for women from Africa and Eastern Europe who had become victims of white slavery. “They both represent the peasant class in Italy and their way of life has survived from the middle ages to today. Also, they both try to make their way in a globalized world which is moving implacably forward”, the director said. The peasant Sergio uses ancient cultivation methods which have been surpassed by industrialized farming. On the other hand, father Oreste is fighting against modern slave trading which is growing day by day. As the director noted, “the third hero of the film is Lorenzeti’s mural itself, as it highlights the story of the necessary struggle for the establishment and preservation of social justice”.
In Cedric Condom’s documentary Cannibal Island, not only is the concept of social justice non existent, but what is featured is the most extreme expressions of the degeneration of human nature: pogrom and cannibalism for survival. The film tells the story of 6,000 undesirables during the Stalinist era who were exiled in 1933 to a remote island in Siberia’s Ob river. There, these unfortunate men, women and children, abandoned with no food or clothing suffered the torture of hunger to the point where they had no choice but to eat each other. “The incident became known with the opening of the Russian files after the fall of communism. The matter was looked into in the ‘30s by a research committee, after a report by a journalist to Stalin, which noted that in four months the exiles began to… disappear. Surely there are other stories which have not yet been discovered”, the director stressed. Cedric Condom discovered this tragic story by accident, seeing an advertisement for a book on the subject written by the historian Nicolas Vert, which he read. During his research, the director had no help from Russian authorities. As he said: “It is not in the nature of Russia to remember these stories”. The documentary had been distributed to television channels all over Europe, but it is banned in Russia.
