Memory of a Water

The point of departure for this story is the death of the Russian Jew Joseph Gruferman and the days before the desecration of his grave. Memory of the Water is partly based on a true event which took place in May, 1990 and inspired the director Hector Faver. It is filmed in black and white, with poetical retrospections on Gruferman's childhood in Russia, and on his adult life
in France. The story is interwoven with documentary pictures from the concentration camps.

Comment:
Memory of the Water is the third generation's testimony to the concentration camps. The director Hector Faver and the script writer Eugenia Kleber are both in their thirties. The film, a fictitious family chronicle with links to the director's private life, takes its origins in the Neo-Nazi grave desecrations in Carpentras in France 1990.
The memory of water is the memory of death - a transparent, mysterious and uniting force. The memories that are woven around the Russian Jew Joseph Gruferman shortly before he commits suicide. Memories that transcend the generation barrier and make up a kind of collective consciousness in the form of the history of the Jewish people. In the film Gruferman's mother, who has survived the concentration camps,
speaks to her son through her diaries. The diaries are in their turn left to the daughter of the son. She is a young drama student and represents the possibility of bearing the memory without going under, as Gruferman did. It is this possibility that Faver and Kleber want to stage.
The mother, through her experiences in the extermination camp, is the point of connection where history ends and where something else, on the other side, has to begin. This demands that the memory lives on. Perhaps the metaphysical dimensions of sorrow and loss in Faver's aesthetic mode would not feel so necessary if it wasn't for the fact that the desecration of Gruferman's tomb in Carpentras designates an attack on this emotional reunion with the dead.
The documentary parts of Memory of the Water to a large extent make it an unendurable film. Not upsetting, revolting or shocking - when the documentary pictures from the Nazi extermination camps fill the screen, we pass the limit of the fathomable. We might have seen the images before, but in Memory of the Water all that which with time has become more and more abstract to later generations is revived. In this film the past becomes an ineffaceble part of existence, as indissoluble and impenetrable as the water.
Cecilia Sjöholm

Orig. titel
La Memoria del agua: Medverkande
Boris Rotenstein, Isabel Abad: Producent
Lluis Serra Sanvicens: Manus
Hector Faver, Eugenia Kleber: Foto
Gerardo Gormezano: Musik
Lira Vitale: Talat språk
Russian, French