Thursday 28 January 2010

Open letter to Pavel Stingl, filmdirector

Dear Pavel,

I saw the trailer of your film "A ghetto named Baluty" (the movie itself seems not to be available yet) but... I don't think I like this film... It gives a lot of picturesque, colourful and tearjerking details from nowadays old Baluty. Nice! Well photographed!
BUT, these colourful sequences from nowadays Baluty in the movie (note: I cannot understand the text/speech; so my impression is only based on what I see) are consequently compared with images from the real ghetto in the Third Reich...

But this is something you cannot compare... not in the film and also not in a trailer.

I mean, Baluty today is NOT a slave laboury camp where at his peak 200,000 people where crammed in the old quarter of Stary Miasto and the slum quarter of Baluty, an area amounting to only six square kilometres where during the four years the ghetto existed some 60,000 people died through starvation, disease, hypothermia, suicide or execution.

In your film you cannot the contemporary rag merchant with his caddie compare with Jews (or Roma) transporting their last belongings and travelling towards their extermination.

Yes, Baluty is partly suffering from poverty, alcoholism and unemployment but this is first of all not the whole story and second absolutely in nothing comparable with the ghetto history.

Furthermore, I saw several nowadays ghetto's and I can tell you this: Baluty is a special neighbourhood, it certainly is, but Baluty has nothing to do with a ghetto, really nothing!

No Pavel Stingl, I will give it a try but I don't think I will make it 87 (or 83?) minutes long.

You say: Baluty then and Baluty now have much in common.... No Pavel Stingl, Baluty then and Baluty now have nothing in common.

It's easy going counterfeiting - falsifying - history. Or worse.

Rob Houkes


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