FRED’s Matt Micucci interviews AleksandraZakrzewska, producer of the film KLEZMER by Piotr Chrzan, which was presented in the Venice Days (Giornate degli Autori) programme of the 72nd Venice Film Festival.
She tells us a little bit about the story of the film and the delicate historical topic it deals with. She also reveals what she thinks might be the reaction to the film, from both the international audience and a Polish one. Aleksandra also tells us about the challenges she was met with in making this film, and a little bit about her background – having made her feature film debut as a producer.
KLEZMER: It is a sunny summer day in 1943. Poland is under German occupation. A group of young people, inhabitants of a nearby village, goes to the forest to gather fir cones and brushwood to use as firewood. They talk, flirt and make plans for the future. However this outing has an unexpected outcome: a certain event that is new to them will change their lives and the lives of other people who appear as the story develops.
“One day, I was playing with other children in the yard behind a big, old house in which we lived with a few other families. We were running around, when suddenly our nanny yelled: ‘Don’t go running there, it’s where they buried the Jew!’ We sat down next to her on the grass and she told us about the only Jew that lived in our village before the war. He was shot dead on a summer day during the war by another villager, a General Government Polish policeman. These strange facts, fascinating for a child, stuck in my mind. Years later, from these memories, coupled with what I had read about the Holocaust, Klezmer was born.”
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