When the Spanish title of this movie hits the screen, it’s very different than the English translation it’s given in subtitle. Adentro mío estoy bailando (“Inside of me I’m dancing”) is offered to us English subtitle readers as the much more straightforward The Klezmer Project. It’s not the first or the last time the movie places a gulf between things that are happening simultaneously.
Showing at the Berlin International Film Festival, The Klezmer Project is co-directed by Leandro Koch and Paloma Schachmann. They also play versions of themselves. The film begins in their native Argentina. Leandro is a frustrated filmmaker stuck making wedding videos. Paloma is a clarinettist who plays at one of the weddings Leandro is recording. She has a deep interest in Klezmer, a traditional Yiddish style of music. He is disconnected from his Jewish Heritage although he’s close with his Jewish grandmother.
As Leonardo and Paloma meet at the wedding they’re working at, an unseen woman’s voice narrates in Yiddish the tale of Yankel and Taibele. Taibele, a rabbi’s daughter, is forbidden from learning the Torah because she’s a woman. Yankel, a gravedigger, pretends to be interested in learning in order to win Taibele’s affection. Things all go to hell when they stumble across the potentially heretical works of Baruch Spinoza.
Leonardo parallels Yankel when he lies about making a documentary about Klezmer music to get closer to Paloma. Except the lie becomes true because here we are watching what is half a documentary featuring real musicians and half a fictionalized telling of their love story and how the documentary got made.
Paloma and Leonardo French kiss outside a dance club that should come with an epilepsy warning. Then Paloma is off to Europe with American ethno-musicologist Bob Cohen to research Klezmer. Leonardo follows after her at a distance to actually make the documentary he never planned to make. In Austria, an old film school friend helps him secure funding and a crew to travel with him to Ukraine and Romania.
Before pitching the film to the funders, Leandro’s friend advises him to cut the love story part and the strain of Jewish self-hatred that’s come out in talks he’s had with his grandmother (talking of funny little hats and not being a huge fan of Klezmer). Just make a documentary about the music and the people who still play it. This opens another gulf as we watch because we know he’s left both of those things in.
These things aren’t really the focus though. More a way to carry the information forward. We learn a lot through Leandro’s voiceover about the disappearance of Yiddish and Klezmer traditions. The movie reminds us though that nothing really disappears, it is only willfully destroyed. As the Austrian crew gets increasingly frustrated that they can’t find any specifically Klezmer artists to film, Leandro teaches us, unheard by them, how the war and differing political factions contributed to Yiddish becoming a language spoken only by the elderly.
The crew packs up and returns to Austria. Paloma joins him for a while in Romania. Then he enters Moldova by himself. We realize as he realizes that this is the homeland his grandmother spoke to him of. Except she always called it Bessarabia. This ancestral land hasn’t entered his blood though, as he says. If his grandma weren’t still alive, if he couldn’t write her a physical letter that he knows she will open and read, would he feel any connection at all?
Leandro’s character is cynical about many things and might never say directly that he feels some special connection to this far off land of his ancestors. But the wedding filmed at the start of the movie is boring for him, it’s work he might consider beneath him as a filmmaker. The glorious Moldovan wedding procession that closes everything out, with its teeming crowd of dancing revellers is probably the high point of the whole film. He is removed from it. It is special. Whether because it’s exotic to him or more joyful or connects him to a lost cultural ancestry. I don’t know which one it is or all three, but the movie did teach me that in Yiddish they call Satan ‘That one’.
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