Voyages – Casting – Nowhere Promised Land: Three Films by Emmanuel Finkiel (on Blu-ray and DVD)

Feature Note: Travel (4/5) Casting – No land promised anywhere (3.5/5)

Synopsis

Travels : Warsaw 1999, a group of Nazi holocaust survivors take a bus to Auschwitz.

Cast : Between 1994 and 1998, for the production of Madame Jacques on the Croisette and Voyages, Emmanuel Finkiel organized a wild casting of non-professionals within the French Ashkenazi community. He built a documentary out of these personal interviews and bits of experimentation, where people’s experiences and the fiction of the characters are constantly intertwined…
No land was promised anywhere : three symbols criss-cross Europe today. Young executive. Student. Kurd and his son. East or west, by truck, in business class, by hitchhiking, by train, paper or paperless, each through modern Europe seeks the promised land.

• Original title: Voyages – Casting – Nowhere Promised Land
• Media tested: Blu-ray
• Genre: drama, documentary
• Year: 1999, 2001, 2008
• Director: Emmanuel Finkiel
• Cast: (1) Shulamit Adar, Lilian Rover, Ester Gorintin, Natan Kogan, Mosku Alkalay, Maurice Cevit (3) Elsa Amiel, Nikolas Vanchki, Haji Aslan, Haji Yusuf Aslan, Joanna Grudzinska
• Duration: 1 hour 44 minutes 14 – 1 hour 27 minutes 31 – 1 hour 34 minutes 32
• Video format: (1) 16:9 (2.3) 4:3
• Cinema format: (1, 3) 1.85/1 (2) 1.37/1
• Subtitle: French, English
• Audio tracks: (1) DTS-HD MA 5.1 Yiddish/French/Russian/German (2) DTS 2.0 French/Hebrew/Yiddish (3) DTS-MA 2.0 French/Turkish/English/German
• Bonus: Combination with Blu-ray and DVD movies Travels, Cast and No land was promised anywhere – Booklet “Journeys to the Promised Land” by Jean-Michel Frodo (8 pages) – Esther’s JourneyDocumentary by David Quesemand (2000, 26 min 29)
• Publisher: Doriane Films

Interpretation of art

Louis-Deluc and César Award for First Film and Editing, Travels In 1999, it was written and directed by Emmanuel Finkiel, an assistant director to Jean-Luc Godard and Krzysztof Kieślowski. It is about the physical and inner journey of three women, Riwka in Poland, Regine in Paris and Vera in Tel Aviv, whose stories are delicately connected thanks to the skill of the Holocaust-themed screenplay. If the stories are independent, many elements tie them together, evoking a larger story and giving the satisfying impression of a controlled narrative expansion. Because, apart from the meaninglessness of these individual destinies, it is almost trivial, Travels By indirectly addressing the implications of the Final Solution and the creation of the State of Israel for the fate of European Jews, it greatly broadened its vision. Three great actresses, Shulamit Adar (Riwka), Liliane Rovère (Regine) and Esther Gorintin (Véra) will interpret their characters with humanity and charming naturalness, which adds to the intensity and emotion of this film, endowed with a unique scene (see bonus booklet). . Emmanuel Finkiel brilliantly combines his artistic choices: chromatic dominance, intensive use of close-ups, realistic location shooting, mastering depth of field, focus on vehicles, etc. This very particular style is already in germ in his short film Caesarized Madame Jacques on the Croisette (1997), will become his trademark and can be observed again No land was promised anywhere It was produced in 2008. Depicting his protagonists’ procrastination in responding to their personalities and existential quests, Travels invites us to share our own personal questions while questioning each one’s place in society more universally. Filmed as a reportage with unknown actors, but always very fair and moving, especially Esther Gorint (see bonus documentary), the film knows how to avoid the pitfalls of the genre and offers the viewer a real freedom of judgment, avoiding any proselytism and any temptation. dispute We can convince ourselves of this by looking Cast (2001), the director reveals to us his preparatory work: an enriching stage in the search for his characters in the French Ashkenazi community. Actors who are interviewed, who speak Yiddish and are mostly older, present their personal version of the text for interpretation. In 2008, Emmanuel Finkiel repeated the ambitious idea of ​​universality by explaining the past fate of several characters. This will happen No land was promised anywhere, the Jean Vigo Prize: it is no longer about the Holocaust, but about Europe, where a student videographer (Elsa Amiel), an industrialist who coldly moves his factory (Nicolas Wanczycki) and a Kurd and his son (Haji and Haji Ysuf Aslan) travel. Moving to England: the many quests for the “promised land” and an imagined freedom. The creative process is not the same, but close to it Travels, invites the viewer to decipher everything that the narrative ellipsis does not reveal. Although the brightness of the scene, the work on image and sound, and the intensity of the situations are admirable, Travels remains a comparatively more action-packed and undeniably more memorable drama, with the added bonus of a landmark restoration in vision-enhancing HD.

Technical Commentary

Travels

The Master was restored in 4K from the original negatives by Cosmodigital with support from CNC in 2022 under the artistic direction of Emmanuel Finkiel.
Audio description of the movie Travels unique

Image : HD copy, excellent definition, excellent sharpness in details, homogeneous film grain (filmed in 35mm, Master Format 4K), image free of any major defects, perfect contrast control, brilliant image detail in shadows, natural color grading, refined colorimetry realistic shades and saturated tones
His : 5.1 multilingual mixing, very clear dialogues, excellent dynamics in the atmosphere, extremely natural spatialization with limited surround effects

Casting – The Promised Land of Nowhere

These two films have not been restored
Pictures : average accuracy, lack of sharpness, strong grain (shot at 35mm), No land was promised anywhere 4/3 size with wide black margins, correct contrasts, dated calibrations, natural colorimetry
His : multilingual 2.0 stereo mixes, clear sounds, good dynamics, very limited (2) and frontal (3) spatialization

Our opinion

Image: Travels (4.5/5) others (3/5)
Sound mixes: Travels (4/5) others (3/5)
Bonuses: (4/5)
Packaging: (3/5)

IMDb
Travels : https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0202077/
Cast : https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0303832/
No land was promised anywhere : https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1303882/

Publisher’s website: https://www.capuseen.com/films/8508-voyages-nulle-part-terre-promise-casting

The Blu-ray/DVD combo is available on Amazon

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