Argentina | Austria 2023
Opening May 30, 2024

Directed by: Leandro Koch, Paloma Schachmann
Writing credits: Leandro Koch, Paloma Schachmann
Principal actors: Documentary: Leandro Koch, Paloma Schachmann, Rebeca Yanover, César Lerner

The Klezmer Project is certainly an ambitious project. It is labelled as a documentary, exploring the history of klezmer music, the instrumental musical tradition of the Ashkenazi Jews of Central and Eastern Europe. But is also wrapped around a semi-fictitious storyline, becoming a road movie and to make it even more multifaceted, a narrator tells an ancient story in Yiddish mirroring the two main protagonists. Leandro Koch and Paloma Schachmann, who are a couple in real life, are joint directors and writers of this multilayered project as well as the film's main characters, Leandro and Paloma.

Leandro earns his money making videos at wedding parties in Buenos Aires. He is of Jewish heritage, but has no interest in his religious roots. At a Jewish wedding he meets Paloma, who plays the clarinet in a klezmer orchestra. He falls in love with her, and when he hears that she is planning a concert tour through Europe, he makes up a story that he is working on a documentary on the history of klezmer music, so that he can travel and spend time with her. He really pulls it off to get financing from an Austrian production company, and a journey through Eastern Europe, from Ukraine to Romania and Moldavia, begins. They come to seemingly forgotten places, remote villages, knocking on doors, looking for their disappearing cultural heritage, talking to the Roma people who have been keeping up the klezmer tradition after the Second World War. A final long wedding scene, filmed in Transcarpathia, with traditional dances and music, brings us full circle. The Klezmer Project won the GWFF prize for best first feature film at the Berlinale in 2023. 117 minutes (Ulrike L.)