Special screening of "Odessa" - work-in-progress
Thursday, June 6, from 9.30 PM, at TIFF Art (Art Museum in Cluj), director Florin Iepan will be present to the screening of his documentary, „Odessa”.
The film deals with a very delicate subject: the massacre of over 20.000 jews committed by the Romanian army during World War 2. The screening will be followed by a debate.
Florin Iepan
"Reshaping Eastern Europe after World War I as a puzzle of national states was the beginning of a disaster for the ethnic diversity in this part of the world. The first target was the Jewish community. When Nazi Germany came to power, Eastern European states could express freely their anti-Semitism. This became known as the "Holocaust on the Periphery".
United Europe proposes prosperity and tolerance for this part of the world. To what extent is this possible in Romania, a democratic country with EU membership? To what extent my compatriots are willing to reflect on a particular episode, the reprisals in Odessa in October 1941, one of the largest mass executions during the war and perhaps the darkest moment in all our modern history?
We found out that small nations can sometimes be cynical, hypocritical, amnesiac and capable of murder. That history is a series of individual choices, which strengthen in times of freedom such as this which we live today. What seemed at first a social experiment under the pretext of making a documentary film became in time a personal experiment. I wonder if the solution proposed by me is moral and efficient. What happens when a documentary breaks out of its comfort zone and provokes openly the society? Why, after seventy years, applying a critical perspective to history appears as too expensive for for Romania? What is the meaning of my work: is it a beginning, an end, or nothing at all?"
