German premiere
Yiddish, French with English subtitles

The film is a dialogue with the absence of Belgian Jewish filmmaker Chantal Akerman. It follows her footsteps along Route 3199 in the Al Naqab desert in Southern Israel/colonised Palestine, where she filmed scenes that were used in her last film No Home Movie (2015). Between two letters, in French and in Yiddish, Vents Violents travels along Akerman’s route while turning the camera towards evidence of colonial practices carried out in this desert on a daily basis, yet hidden from Akerman’s camera. In its second part, the film reaches a dead end. The attempt to mourn Akerman at a time of a ravaging genocide in Gaza – committed by Israel as the world turns a blind eye – is tormenting. The film asks to destabilise the sense of reading localities via images, constantly shifting between video and 16mm film, as it moves from the Al Naqab desert to the Père-Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. The film is a reckoning with the blind spot of European Jewry towards the settler colonisation of Palestine by Zionism and the ongoing Palestinian Nakba.

• Programm Programme: A Lingering Wave