France,
1999, 115 min
Shown in 2000
CREDITS
- dir
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Emmanuel Finkiel
- prod
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Yaël Fogiel
- scr
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Emmanuel Finkiel
- cam
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Hans Meier, Jean Claude Larrieu
- editor
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Emmanuelle Castro
- cast
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Shulamit Adar, Liliane Rovère, Esther Gorintin, Nathan Cogan, Moscu Alcalay
- source
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New Yorker Films, 16 W 61st St., New York, NY 10023. FAX: 212-307-7855. ; World Sales: MK2 Productions, 55, rue Traversière, 75012 Paris, France. FAX: 33-1-43-41-32-30
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COMMENTS
Emmanuel Finkiel in person.
OTHER
Critical mythology holds that assistant directors seldom make successful transitions to the main chair, but Emmanuel Finkiel—Jean-Luc Godard’s former assistant and Krzysztof Kieslowski’s right hand on the "Three Colors" trilogy—is clearly an exception to that generalization. Though his way of knitting the stories of three Holocaust survivors suggests some of Kieslowski’s formal experiments, the tone—one of sober, tearless tenderness—is Finkiel’s alone. An elderly woman on a bus tour of Poland is left behind at a Jewish cemetery; a Parisian housewife receives a phone call from a man claiming to be her father—thought to have died in a concentration camp—and a newly arrived Russian immigrant wanders the streets of Tel Aviv looking for a distant cousin. Working with a largely non-professional cast, Finkiel builds his effects with patience and care, mounting to a quietly devastating finale that brings the stories together. Each story’s underlying theme: Behind the horror of the Holocaust lies the less conspicuous, but no less damaging, horror of forgetting.
—Dave Kehr
FACTOID #125
According to the November 29, 1959 San Diego Union, The Village on the River was the first Dutch feature ever shown in the U.S. (at the Third San Francisco International Film Festival).
