Berlin Premiere ‘City’ Tells Untold Stories of Thessaloniki’s Jews During WWII
variety.comChristopher Vourlias Training their lens on the largely untold story of the atrocities committed against Thessaloniki’s Jewish population during World War II, Syllas Tzoumerkas and Christos Passalis will bow “The City and the City” Feb.
15 in the Berlin Film Festival’s competitive Encounters strand.Unspooling in six fragmented chapters, the film tells the story of Thessaloniki’s Jewish community from the first half of the 20th century until the present day, where contemporary life reflects a city that violently and irrevocably lost its multicultural character, almost overnight.Natives who both left Thessaloniki in their twenties, the directors said they wanted to focus on what Tzoumerkas described as a “blind spot” in their respective upbringings, in which the suffering and near annihilation of the city’s Jewish community went virtually unmentioned. “It’s both a homecoming for us, and also it’s an act of exhuming, in the sense of bringing up the dead in the city,” he said.
Sitting at an ancient crossroads of East and West, Greece’s second city has for centuries been a cultural melting pot. In the 1400s, Sephardic Jews expelled from Spain settled in Thessaloniki, then part of the Ottoman Empire, helping to shape its cultural and economic life for centuries to come.
By the turn of the 20th century, Jews comprised roughly half the city’s population.During the Second World War, however, tens of thousands of Jews were deported from Thessaloniki to concentration camps; by some estimates, up to 97% of the city’s Jewish population was killed.
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