Amit Epstein
German/Israeli videomaker
biography
participant in
CologneOFF V – 5th Cologne Online Film Festival 2009
Video no longer availableonline!
Title:
Stockholm syndrome part 1 –
golden mission
2007, 15:00
synopsis
Stockholm.Syndrome Is a video trilogy about the tendencies of Jews to return to Europe, as many young Israelis find themselves attached to a homeland in which they were never born while perfectly aware of the victim-victimizer relationship, which is well rooted in the fabrication of Israelism.
My grandparents’ house was, and still is, a haven. Today I know that other such “European havens” are scattered throughout Israel, and, once joined together, they may form a sort of natural reserve, an image of “classical Europe”, where each day starts out in 1948, but ends in 1938. Positioned at the focal point of my education, elegance was perceived as the finest of qualities. In retrospect, it may have been a mistake to allow me to spend so many hours in grandmother’s world: a magical world of matching shades and floral patterns, whose logic, ideology and order were clear to my grandmother alone. My great attraction to all that was foreign to my natural habitat was apparently just as intense as my grandmother’s disgust towards that which did not resemble, sound like or behave like a sarcastic imitation of the world which had rejected her. Grandmother’s life-long production, the great parody of European bourgeoisie, finally found a sympathetic audience, embodied in my biased character. Unlike grandmother, I never actually met any Germans, just like I had never been to Europe. But both the “Germans” and “Europe” were my “black milk”. Despite this, or perhaps because of this, curiosity surpassed anxiety. For me, forever outside the joyous circle of dancers, that icon of barefoot Israeli folklore, I felt a longing for a distant homeland, and these sensations were of a taste as colorful as marmalade, and a scent as strong as Brandy and Herring. It was a homeland of pale kids who don’t even want to go out on field trips, who couldn’t care less about hitting back, whose life is one on-going, ever lasting Memorial Day.