‘PREMIERE: Birobidjan - Guy-Marc Hinant’

Birobidjan (Guy-Marc Hinant, BE, 2015, 125’)

In 1934 Stalin thought up an independent entity where communist Jews from all across the globe could build themselves a new home: Birobidzhan. Who were those people who, five years before the outbreak of WWII and fifteen years before the foundation of Israel, left from the US, Argentina, France and Belgium to this Promised Land, a desolate marshy area in the far east of Siberia, near the Chinese border, some 8,400 kilometres from Moscow? What today, after the purges and auto-da-fés, is left of this has almost entirely been forgotten. With drawings by artist Dominique Goblet and musical explorations by Winter Family, this film reveals an intimate and gloomy portrait of Birobidzhan. A last inventory before extinction...

Together with Dominique Lohlé, Guy-Marc Hinant, co-founder of the Brussels-based Sub Rosa label, made a variety of documentaries on key figures in the world of avant-garde music, among whom Charlemagne Palestine, Henri Pousseur and Zbigniew Karkowski.