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The city that was left in the fog of oblivion

Book review written by Carmen Gray
Charleroi, The Land of 60 Mountains
Regissør: Guy-Marc Hinant
(Belgia)

BYHISTORIER / BELGIUM: The filmmaker Guy-Marc Hinant wants to save the hometown's reputation by digging out the forgotten stories that have been hidden in the slag heaps of the city's memories.

(THIS ARTICLE IS ONLY MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)

Before the State of Israel was founded, Stalin established an autonomous Jewish province farthest east of Russia at the border with China. The administration center was the town of Birobidjan, which is located along the Trans-Siberian railway. Any illusion that the Soviet leader was doing this for altruistic reasons disappeared when he initiated Jewish persecution in this area – 2 years after the province was founded in 1934. In the poetic and multifaceted documentary portrait Birobidjan from 2015, Belgian filmmaker Guy-Marc Hinant, who has a sensitive sense of places in disrepair, tried to find the links between the past and the present to this enigmatic Jewish settlement. His latest documentary, Charleroi, The Land of 60 Mountains, picks up the thread from the dream, which today is a distant memory, of the promised homeland.

A city with many possibilities

The film is inspired by the story of Benjamin Silberberg, who with his family planned to emigrate to Birobidjan from his hometown of Charleroi in 1934. The journey never took place; they were drawn into the war. . .

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Carmen Gray
Gray is a regular film critic in Ny Tid.

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