Archival history is also mined with passion in Lena Einhorn’s NINA’S JOURNEY (2007; Brandeis: April 3 at 7 pm), which explores the youth of the filmmaker’s mother in the Warsaw Ghetto, and Yves Jeuland’s COMME UN JUIF EN FRANCE|BEING JEWISH IN FRANCE (2007; Brandeis: March 30 at noon), a three-hour portrait of the Gallic people’s love-hate relationship with Jews and their own liberalism. But Ran Tal’s CHILDREN OF THE SUN (2007; Brandeis: April 12 at 8:30 pm) sticks to the frontal lobe — a personal oral history of the kibbutz, using only found footage and home movies, and narrated exclusively by aged kibbutzniks whose memories volley between idyllic and traumatized. As well they might be: the kibbutz ideology echoed, on its own small scale, the Stalinist and Nazi battery of ideals (purity! blue eyes!) and rituals (propaganda songs! torch-lit rallies!) it ran contemporaneous with in the 1930s, and together the fetishization of agrarian labor, cultural insularity, and child-parent separation all give off the familiar, rank odor of many more disastrous social experiments before and since. Tal’s film makes it gently clear that though the kibbutz may have been, in many ways, a utopia, like all philosophically motivated utopias it was fated to extremism, backward thinking, and übermensch silliness, and the children end up paying the highest price of all.
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