About Emil Weiss

As a Curriculum Vitae.

I was born on November 22, 1947 in Cluj, capital of Transylvania, place of origin of Magyars but attached to Romania in 1918 by the Treaty of Versailles. During the Second World War, part of this territory was again annexed to Hungary and the mass deportation of the Jews in 1944 constituted a deep and tenacious trauma in our consciences also in the years following the war.

Two of my uncles returned from Auschwitz, in fragments I learned things, but in my family as well as outside it was silence that was required. Nothing was done to know the aspects of history or to promote a process of appeasement. For a long time I remained overwhelmed by a confused feeling, of shame and revolt mixed.

For a long time I deliberately stayed away from this phenomenon, all the usual nominations of which, even today, are partially or totally incorrect:

«Holocaust», «Shoah» and many others such as «The destruction of the Jews of Europe».

Trying to involve myself after a long gestation, through an aesthetic and ethical gesture at the same time, by placing myself in the field of objective knowledge and the plastic exercise specific to the cinematograph, was for me the object of a quest during four decades. Quest for meaning that led me to carry out a certain number of works which are not all dedicated to the search for a possible outcome of this original cataclysm that imposed itself on me these last fourteen years.

Today, it seems to me that we had to wait until the age of a certain wisdom of cells, reach an uncertain knowledge of finitude to address such a huge subject that resists understanding by humans, resists "re-presentations".

At the time of my birth, my mother, who was not deported, had enough milk to breastfeed several babies whose mothers, returnees from there, were dry. I wish I could do the same.

Emil Weiss