Me'kivun ha'yaar

English title: Out of the Forest

German title: Stimmen aus dem Wald

Series title: Asynchron. Dokumentar- und Experimentalfilme zum Holocaust ( )

Director: Limor Pinhasov    → show biography   ← hide biography

Biography: Limor Pinhasov Ben Yosef was born in 1972 in Tel Aviv, Israel. In 1992/93 she studied art history and philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris. In 1996 she graduated from the Sam Spiegel Film School in Jerusalem. She has been working as a film editor since 1998. She directed her first film, Sophie Calle in Jerusalem, in 1999. OUT OF THE FOREST was her first full-length documentary.

Director: Yaron Kaftori    → show biography   ← hide biography

Biography: Yaron Kaftori Ben Yosef was born in 1963 in Haifa, Israel. From 1987 to 1990 he studied film and TV; between 1994 and 1995 he studied history at Tel Aviv University. Since 2001 he has been working as a producer. In 2002 he started an independent distribution company for Israeli feature films. Yaron Kaftori also works as a screenwriter. OUT OF THE FOREST was his directorial debut.

Director: Limor Pinhasov Ben Yosef

Director: Yaron Kaftori Ben Yosef

Country: Israel

Year: 2003

Synopsis: "Friday July 11, 1941, the weather is nice with some warm wind blowing. Only a few clouds are in the sky. Shots were heard coming out of the forest.” These are the opening words in the diary of Kazimierz Sakowicz, a Pole living in Ponar, a village about 10 km west of Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania. From 1941 until 1944, more than 100,000 people, most of them Jews, were killed in Ponar. Sakowicz hears the shots and understands that something strange is going on in the vicinity. He decides to secretly write down what he hears and sees. Altogether he documents 835 days of the genocide. Through the guidance of Sakowicz’s diary, Out of the Forest tells the story of the people who lived in the backyard of a mass murder site: the story of the girl who herded her cows on the open grave; the story of the woman who was forced to cook for the murderers; of the man who sold clothing of the dead; and of the woman who refused to open the door to a fugitive who just minutes before had barely escaped execution. It is also a story about neighbours and community in the hardest of times; the story of how different communities – Poles, Lithuanians, and Jews – see the same horrifying events totally differently, and how 60 years later, each community refuses to take any responsibility for its actions and puts all the responsibility on others. The film is built as a collage, using the accounts of locals, the testimonies of victims who miraculously escaped death at Ponar, the written diary, and images of Ponar today. There is no archival footage, nor images of corpses or blood, but rather sensitive questioning and a discreet camera that succeed in penetrating the superficially quiet surface of the village.

Language: Russian, Polish, Lithuanian

Forum participation year: 2004, 2015

Forum catalogue PDF: Download