"A young woman named Aurélia Steiner writes to a changing and multifold recipient : a sailor lover, the spectator, her dead parents, her Jewish ancestors exterminated in the camps. She speaks of desire, of death. The white rectangular screen becomes the white rectangular assembly yard of the extermination camp. The music-less film on the unmentionable alternates between images of different landscapes (the sky, the sea, the trees) and the author's hand-written text." Bernard Sarrut "There is no white in colour film. True whiteness; that of snow, froth, white flowers on moonlit nights, can only be rendered through black and white. The snow in Aurélia Steiner is present in the sea foam along Vancouver's docks, I recognised it in the film. When I wrote Aurélia Steiner Vancouver, I wasn't sure I would be able to shoot the film. I wrote it in the joy of never shooting it. Had I not been given the five million to shoot it, I would have made a black film, a strip of black optical tape. Aurélia Steiner is inside the concentration camps; that is where she lives. The German concentration camps, Auschwitz, Birkenau, were all continental places, suffocating places: very cold in winter, scorching hot in summer, landlocked within Europe, far away from the sea. That is where she carries herself in order to write her story, the story of the Jewish people since forever. The film Aurélia Steiner Vancouver was impossible. It got made. The film is admirable because it doesn't attempt to rectify the impossibility. It accompanies the impossibility, walking alongside it. You must allow the exterior to come to you. For instance, I don't have an idea as to which image should go beneath the young hangman from Auschwitz; it is only when I pass by the Mauldre's row of poplar trees that I say to myself : this will be it." Marguerite Duras
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