Rachel Gutgarts

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“How do you sing a song to the lord in a strange land?” This passage from psalms 137:4 followed by the famous passage, ‘If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning’ was the catalyst that sent me into this project, after leaving Jerusalem, my hometown, in order to immigrate to France. 

At first, I imagined that the strange land described in the passage would be, for me, France. I would come back to Jerusalem, to create and collect a few hand-crafted relics, in order to sing that song. 

When I arrived to Jerusalem, in the midst of the ongoing war, looking at the place I grew up from an outsider perspective, noticing all historical and religious narratives are drafted to war and radical messianic ideas, I discovered that in fact, the land that I thought I knew, became estranged to me, and the question, how do you sing a song to the lord in this land, remained an open one.

Rachel Gutgarts

Born in 1992 in Jerusalem, experimental filmmaker Rachel Gutgarts is a graduate of the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design. My graduation film, A Love Letter to the One I Made Up (6', 2017), has been screened at numerous festivals. In 2020, I moved to France to produce VIA DOLOROSA (10’, 2023) with MIYU Productions. After the premiere of VIA DOLOROSA at the Semaine de la Critique at the Cannes Film Festival in 2023, I began my studies at Le Fresnoy – Studio national des arts contemporains (Vera Molnár cohort, 2023–2025). There I produced HOW DO YOU SING A SONG TO THE LORD IN A STRANGE LAND, a multimedia installation presented as part of the Panorama 26 exhibition in Tourcoing.

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