Golem The Spirit of Exile

Based on an interpretation of the golem in the Spanish Kabbalah – the golem as an incarnation of exile and wanderers – the film explores the contemporary meanings of the Book of Ruth in the Bible.

“The Book of Ruth is based on a documentary story: a family in Bethlehem suffers from the famine there and goes to Moab, the ‘new country of exile’. But the biblical writer takes this event and transforms it into fictional material. And this then becomes eventually even more than fiction: it becomes a sanctified myth. We, in turn, place the biblical story in the present and work with those ambiguities, but we strip away some of the sanctification, keeping the mythological echoes but placing them in the here and now. The issue of creation is the general framework of the film and, inside this framework, there is a permanent back and forth movement to the issue of exile. Through the golem, I tried to deal with some of my own questions regarding cinematic language. In Golem The Spirit of Exile, the central spine of the story is the theme of being uprooted, which links the whole trilogy.”

Amos Gitai, in Yann Lardeau, Les Films d’Amos Gitai, unpublished

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Cast Hanna Schygulla, Vittorio Mezzogiorno, Ophrah Shemesh, Samuel Fuller, Mireille Perrier, Sotigui Kouyaté, Fabienne Babe, Antonio Carallo, Bernhard Levy, Bakary Sangare, Alain Maratrat, Marceline Loridan, Bernardo Bertolucci, Bernard Eisenschitz, Marisa Paredes, Fernand Moskowicz, and a few members of the Pina Bausch

Screenplay Amos Gitai, Stephan Levine Cinematography Henri Alekan Sound Antoine Bonfanti, Daniel Ollivier 
Editing Anna Ruiz Music Simon Stockhausen, Markus Stockhausen Production design Thierry François
Costumes Marie Vernoux, Jean-Pierre Delifer

Production Agav Films, Groupe TSF, Canal + (France), Allarts (The Netherlands), Nova Films, RAI 2 (Italy),

Friedländer Filmproduktion (Germany), Channel Four (UK), Euroimage Line producer Laurent Truchot

FESTIVAL

• Berlin International Film Festival/Berlinale 1992