Nabis Filmgroup, Nevada Cine
MOVIE REVIEW
The Klezmer Project (2023)
What happens when a self-described “mediocre cameraman” falls in love with a klezmer clarinetist he meets at a wedding in Buenos Aires? They get funding from Austrian television to make a documentary about klezmer music in Eastern Europe, of course. This unusual Argentinian documentary melds three intertwined strands – Yiddish folk tales, the lives of and the romance between the directors and the search for Jewish music in the parts of the world where the Jews were most thoroughly exterminated – into a story of how music and language are used as the building blocks for personal identity, and what personal identity means in a globalized world. It’s not an entire success, largely for reasons which should have been obvious to codirectors Leandro Koch and Paloma Schachmann before they started, but it’s such an unusual story the weaknesses are easily forgiven.