The Longings of Maya Gordon

54 Minutes, 2017
Genre:
Documentary

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Directed by: Yair Lev, Etty Wieseltier
Language: Hebrew
| Subtitles not available

Filmmakers Yair Lev and Etti Wieseltier’s documentary is a portrait of Israeli artist, Maya Gordon. Polish-born Gordon is in Krakow, showing at a group exhibition. Her piece is an enormous inflatable contraption, reminiscent of a sideboard her parents used to have at home. The film focuses on the interwovenness of memory and art. Gordon displays her memories, and goes as far as to literally cook them. They are all dipped in a deep sense of longing: to Poland, family, friends – and especially the late poet, Hezy Leskly, who was a close friend of Gordon’s.
Gordon, who never married and has never wanted children is quoted in the film, saying how “love is something totally different… I didn’t feel the urge to start a family, per se, but certainly to form a tribe.” And indeed, Leskly was part of that tribe. The film opens with a quote from one of his poems: “the poem that was with me in the room flickered five or six times; then it went out. I was left alone in the dark, without the poem, that had promised nothing and delivered on most everything.”
Wieseltier and Lev’s camera travels back and forth between Gordon’s various on-again-off-again homes in her native Poland, Amsterdam, and Israel. In her efforts to locate the migrant transit camp where she grew up, in the northern town of Nahariya, she crosses paths with Nachum – an IDF veteran who has been living with PTSD since the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Before long, the extroverted artist and introverted man strike up a unique relationship.
The film was featured at the Docaviv International Documentary Film Festival, and countless others around the world.

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