Salonique, ville du silence

01/01/2006

A fascinating, revealing, and poetic documentary exposing the disappearance, obliteration, and omission of a culture. The disappearance of a humanist equilibrium during the Ottoman Empire and the willful erasing of the nonconformist history of a city that did not adhere to the nationalistic ideology that turned the Balkans upside down and continues to do so. The ancient Jerusalem of the Balkans has become a forgotten city, a “judenfrei” city. Organized like a stroll around the urban environment and accommodating the words of survivors of the extermination camps of 1943, the film puts together fragments of memories and nostalgia to witness the exceptional past of the city. A Thessaloniki-born director tres to raise his own cinematic voice, to refuse the elimination and silence which are like a second death, more definitive than the first.