The Address On The Wall Receives Praise At Numerous Festivals
The film “The Address On The Wall” by Serge Krutsenko has been positively marked at various recent film festivals. Namely, the motion picture has received a prize at the Wallachia Film Festival in the Feature Movies category. This award largely serves a tribute to the late director and composer Serge Krutsenko who sadly passed away in the beginning of 2023.
Being a docudrama parable, which is an artistic study of human nature, the film researches the reasons of a sudden change which turns a doctor or a builder, a musician or an actor, into a murderer, a fascist capable of killing another human being. How can one person murder their own kind only for the racial differences? This is what happened at Babyn Yar in Kyiv in 1941. The film became a core of the International Humanistic Project “The Address On The Wall”…
So far, the motion picture has been marked at 16 film festivals. The list is far from being final, however, and it will definitely be expanded.
Alex Ansky, the Israeli actor, journalist, and presenter, arrived in Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine, in 2016, to participate as an announcer in a memorial concert for the Babyn Yar tragedy on the 75th anniversary of the massacre. At the concert, Ansky narrates biblical verses from “Cain and Abel” which were integrated into the fourth movement of the symphonic poem “Genesis” by the Israeli composer Baruch Berliner.
The concert, performed by the National Philharmonic Orchestra of Ukraine, was the motive for creating the film “The Address On The Wall”, which deals with the Holocaust of the Jews of Kyiv and in which Ansky took the opportunity to delve deeper into the history of the Jews of Ukraine and the terrible Babyn Yar massacre. When Ansky walked along the streets of modern Kyiv, he had a hard time imagining that 75 years ago Nazi soldiers walked along those same streets…
At the concert, a connection was made between the Israeli producer and entrepreneur Nachum Slutzker and the late Ukrainian director Serge Krutsenko. In the film the two created, they describe the ferocious and dramatic change in the lives of the Jews of Kyiv from the day the Nazis entered Kyiv, and their unfortunate fate during the harsh and violent period of the war, and the massacre in which approximately 100,000 Jews of Kyiv were murdered.
The film tells us about several characters who were invited together to the war and into the plot of the film, each in their own circumstances. For example, the German soldier Hans, taken into the Nazi army against his will and dragged into the machine of war and inevitable violence.
In contrast to the Nazi brutality, we witness the innocent and tender feelings of Hans, which are woven into the looks without words, to a young Jewish girl, while she goes on her last walk. Neither of them have any idea where the killing machine will take them.
The film “The Address on the Wall” raises questions and thoughts such as:
Who we are? Why do we murder each other from the dawn of our existence?
Who am I, Cain or Abel? This is the question of questions and we must choose where we should go! The question, which is relevant even today, is how is it possible for normal human beings to become monsters in an instant?
The film ends with the epilogue ”El Maleh Rachamim” – “God full of Mercy” an ancient funeral Jewish prayer for the dead, performed by Baruch Berliner, which commemorates the memory of the victims of the Holocaust.
The film was created with the support of Baruch Berliner International Project
Running time: 60 minutes
Language: Hebrew/German (English subtitles)
Why do we murder each other from the dawn of our existence?
