Daveed Shwartz
Israeli filmmaker
participant in
VideoChannel – Shoah Film Collection
.
[flvgallery video=”http://video.newmediaserver.org/2010/01/shoah/schwartz.flv” title=”view video” thumbnail=”http://video.newmediaserver.org/2010/01/shoah/img/shwartz.jpg” width=”640″ height=”480″]
Video title:
I saw a mountain
2009, 5 minutes
Few years ago I read the poem “I saw a mountain” by Moiche Schulstein. I was struck by its powerful imagery and put a copy of the poem in the drawer, knowing that I’ll have to revisit it sooner or later.
In 2004, I joined my parents – who are both holocaust survivors – on a very emotional journey to their hometown of Lodge, Poland. They were also invited to participate in the ceremonies for the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Lodge ghetto. After that trip, coming back to L.A, I began working on a short animation film based on the poem. In the film, my father reads the poem in Yiddish. At one point I abandoned the project , but recently I went back and completed it.
Although the poem is the inspiration to the movie, as I was working on it, it became its own entity; it became a film not only about the destruction of the people who used to walk in those shoes, but also about the destruction of their culture. The sound of Yiddish and the Hebrew letters are very prominent in addition to the images of shoes.