A Conversation Between Narcisa Hirsch and Chantal Akerman

Introduced by Jessica Sarah Rinland

Tell Me
Chantal Akerman, 1980, 45 min

In Chantal Akerman’s episode for the series “Grand Mothers” commissioned by French television, she walks through Paris entering various homes inhabited by older women, all Jewish survivors of the Holocaust. She politely sits at their kitchen tables, listening attentively to their testimonies. There is warmth and familiarity within these interactions, a sensitivity that is reinforced when Chantal shares that she does not have grandparents, “everybody died during the war”; her mother Natalia, whose voice we hear intermittently throughout the film, also survived the Shoah.

Pioneers
Narcisa Hirsch, 1976, 45 min

Following the 19th Century pogroms of Russia, Poland and Romania, Jewish refugees fled to Argentina forming agricultural communities. Filmed on 16mm colour and black & white in 1976, and rarely shown until now, Pioneers (Pioneros) is a remarkable gem and a testimony to this history. An episodic road movie in which Narcisa Hirsch’s distinctive eye travels to various Jewish towns across Argentina interviewing their charismatic dwindling population, and those who have since left its fields for the city of Buenos Aires.

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Presented as part of Open City Documentary Festival