à la recherche de ma lieu de naissance (Looking for My Birthplace)

Film director Boris Lehman returns, after 44 years, to Lausanne, where he was born in 1944, at the end of the war.

"Film director Boris Lehman returns, after 44 years, to Lausanne, where he was born in 1944, at the end of the war. He only lived there one year. His parents were Jews who had sought refuge in Belgium when the Nazis seized power in Poland. Forced to flee from Belgium during the German occupation, they had reached neutral Switzerland after a clandestine journey across France. Boris Lehman remembers nothing of all this. His parents are dead, all witnesses have disappeared. Armed with only a few documents and photographs found in a cardboard box, he wanders through Lausanne, searching for signs that would evoke his presence, his early life, the evidence of his very existence. But the city remains silent and remote."
- Freddy Buache, Boris Lehman: films that say “I”

“Does a first person cinema exist today? In a system of production inexorably modeled on the American standard, works that dare to be subjective, both in style and content, are growing scarce. In this simplistic context, the Belgian film-maker Boris Lehman seems a dinosaur of the 7th art.”
- Marcel Leiser