Yolande Zauberman
What I saw around my bed - Film - 2025
presented as part of the exhibition Panorama 27
Film
The rich Jews...
My brother told me that one day—I was three or four years old at the time—I took off my knickers in the street and showed my bum to passers-by. He asked me what I was doing and I answered, “cinema.” When people ask when I started wanting to make films, this is the story I tell.
As a child, a teenager, a young adult, I used to lie down everywhere. I dreamed eighteen hours a day. In fact, I was having nightmares, the films I played in my mind, full of deaths, love, silences…
Sometimes my eyes saw people who made me want to get up on my feet. Like that old man who looked like Groucho Marx. He sifted through the dust sold to him by jewellers looking for gold. He had saved one of my uncles in Poland. Like that woman who looked like Edith Piaf and sang like her but in Yiddish, at weddings, everywhere, wherever there was a platform. Like that other person who had experienced horror, rapes and deaths, and spent her life dancing with her children.
I would like to recreate that mixture of dread and joys, of horrors and miracles, into which I was born.
In the images of films of weddings, of bar mitzvahs, of circumcisions, I would like to tell these stories of sons of dairymen, of wood merchants, of daughters of alcohol merchants – Jews born in Poland, all of them, who came to France as penniless orphans. Stories of wonderful and terrifying survivals.
Yolande Zauberman
Yolande Zauberman was born in Paris. Having learned about filmmaking working with the director Amos Gitaï, in 1987 she made her first documentary, Classified People, on apartheid in South Africa. This won numerous prizes, including the Grand Prix du Festival de Paris. In 1989 her Caste Criminelle, which she shot in India, was selected for the Festival de Cannes. Three years later she made her first fiction, in Yiddish: Moi Ivan, toi Abraham, which garnered several international prizes, including the Youth Prize at Cannes. She followed up with a documentary, Would you have sex with an Arab? (Venice Film Festival, 2011), and then M, exploring the world of Israeli nightlife (a winner of prizes worldwide, including the French César for the best documentary in 2020). Her most recent film is La Belle de Gaza.
