WHAT : Synopsis

Britany, winter 2017

An old man, perched on a huge stone of several tons, strikes. He carves a monument. It is not the first one.

Shelomo Selinger is a sculptor but also a former deportee and what he carves is the monument of the deportees of Luxembourg. He became famous after having realized the monument of Drancy, the place of internment of the French Jewish deportees, in the suburbs of Paris.

Shelomo working on the Drancy sculpture in 1976.

Sculpting is not the right word. Shelomo strikes, one of the hardest rocks ever, granite. It's a choice. A choice from his past that intertwines with the Great History.

Shelomo working on the Shoa's memorial for Luxembourg on 2018

Because Shelomo Selinger is both the memory of the Shoa, deportation and forced labor, but also the journey through Europe and the Mediterranean to reach Palestine and the war that then triggered, for the State Israel.

Shelomo experienced all this firsthand, but he does not remember anything.

He became a sculptor in the 50s, left the kibbutz in Israel and moved to Paris where he still lives, sculpting and drawing. Through artistic practice, Shelomo has gradually regained his memory.

His son, Rami Selinger, is also a sculptor but a sculptor. He is a plastic surgeon and repairer: his work is directly inspired by the activity and history of his father. "My father works memory, through the granite. I work oblivion, through the flesh " says Rami.

"One helps to remember, the other to forget: here we are at the center of the problem. What is the place of memory and what is the place of forgetting? The memory of my father, of my people, is like a burning flame and must never be extended. But the memory of suffering is itself a suffering. We must manage to hold the torch without getting burned. And without burning others".

Rami also participates in humanitarian missions of reconstructive surgery in the West Bank. The flesh and the granite thus become quest fields.

Rami Selinger during a surgery

The principle of this project is to go through the life of Shelomo where she joins the Great History. This journey is made with the help of his son Rami and an "intimate narrator - investigator", childhood friend of Rami and Shelomo, Pierre Abramovici, historian and journalist. The story is therefore historical but poetic and intimate, punctuated by numerous archives and documents and by the realization of the Shoa Memorial in Luxembourg.

WHO AND WHY : the director

This film is co-written together with Pierre Abramovici, historian and journalist, and directed by Anna Recalde Miranda, an italian-paraguayan filmmaker. She graduated in media sociology in Bologna, Italy. She directed and produced several documentaries, some reportages and participated to multimedia artistic projects. She lives and works in France.

http://www.annarecaldemiranda.com

The film projects she has made focus on memory and recent history.

This project is particularly important because Shelomo Selinger is one of the last survivors of concentration camps.

Despite the constant search for funding, the film has been realized until now in self-financing. To ensure the post-production phase, we therefore use crowdfunding.

WHEN : the temporalities

The shooting occurred during the years 2017 and 2018, following Shelomo's work on the sculpture and culminating in the pose of sculpture itself in Luxembourg.

Editing and post-production are planned for the first part of 2019 (expected end around April / May 2019).

Thanks to Ruthy Selinger and Claude Olivier for the photos.

La chair et le granit

The publications