A small Romanian village at the end of the19th century, in the midst of rising anti-Semitism. With his latest film, Holy Week, presented in the Forum section of the 2024 Berlinale, Andrei Cohn invites us to question our (in)humanity.
“Why violence?” This could be the title of Holy Week (Săptămâna Mare in its original version), the new film by Romanian director Andrei Cohn, presented this year in the Forum section of the 74th Berlinale.
The pitch? It’s the end of the 19th century, in a small Romanian village lost in the green countryside. A dull hatred is gradually making itself heard. It targets all those considered “foreigners” in the country, namely the Roma, the Turks, and above all the Jews.
In its desire to understand the roots of hatred, and more specifically those of the Holocaust, Holy Week quickly resonates with one of German filmmaker Michael Haneke‘s toughest works, 2009’s The White Ribbon. We feel the same non-judgmental gaze, but one that sincerely questions and wonders how it could have come to this. How neighbors could, at times, go from simple quarrels to a murderous spiral.
The problem is that the director sometimes (often?) finds it hard to draw us into his anatomy of violence. Out of nearly two and a half hours, perhaps half an hour or 45 minutes should have been cut off. We understand his desire to show us (almost) everything, moments of silence, suffering, night (a lot). But the genius and intelligence of cinema also lie in its ability to get to the heart of the matter. This new film by Andrei Cohn will at least have the merit of questioning us about the dark side that exists in all of us.
