Winner of the Antonio Ripoll Award for Best Editing

Poetry is like prayer – timeless. The images, poetry, art, archival footage, geographical spaces, personalities, memory and actuality of life are beautifully composed in one documentary where questions, answers, the quest for life, for truth, for meaning become alive through the poetry of a holocaust survivor and Yiddish poet Avrom Sutzkever and his granddaughter Hadas Kalderon. The Antonio Ripoll Award for Best Editing goes to Emily Felder for Who Will Remain? (Emily Felder, Christa Whitney, USA, 2021). The jury would like to thank Emily Felder, Christa Whitney, Hadas and all the filmmakers who enabled us to share in this deeply personal experience of a poet whose spirit prevailed in the darkest of times.

Who Will Remain?

Attempting to better understand her grandfather Avrom Sutzkever, Israeli actress Hadas Kalderon travels to Lithuania, using her grandfather’s diary to trace his early life in Vilna and his survival of the Holocaust. Sutzkever (1913–2010) was an acclaimed Yiddish poet—described by the New York Times as the “greatest poet of the Holocaust”—whose verse drew on his youth in Siberia and Vilna, his spiritual and material resistance during World War II, and his post-war life in the State of Israel. Kalderon, whose native language is Hebrew and must rely on translation of her grandfather’s work, is nevertheless determined to connect with what remains of the poet’s bygone world and confront the personal responsibility of preserving her grandfather’s literary legacy. Woven into the documentary are family home videos, newly recorded interviews, and archival recordings, including Sutzkever’s testimony at the Nuremberg Trial. Recitation of his poetry and personal reflections on resisting Nazi forces as a partisan fighter reveal how Sutzkever tried to make sense of the Holocaust and its aftermath. As Kalderon strives to reconstruct the stories told by her grandfather, the film examines the limits of language, geography, and time.

 

Credits

  • Directed by

Emily Felder
Christa Whitney

  • Edited by

Emily Felder

  • Produced by

Christa Whitney
Hadas Kalderon
Jesse M. Abraham

  • Cast

Hadas Kalderon
Avrom Sutzkever
Mira Sutzkever
Ruth Wisse