Boris Lehman - Babel : Fin du cycle

After a journey of over 9,000 kilometers, somewhere at the end of the world, the filmmaker arrives in a former autonomous Jewish enclave imagined by Stalin, in order to find traces of his name. But the end is also about death, stopping, not moving, and the allegory of the train stopping in the camps. So he intersperses this journey with encounters with people, with others, who in turn become the film’s subject and storytellers.
– Bertrand Gevart (A History of Hair [Siberia])

How can you film your own death? How can you stage it? At first sight this might raise a smile, and yet this question concerns everyone, even if you’re not a film-maker. Funeral (on the Art of Dying) presents itself as the ‘last’ episode of my auto-cine-biographic work Babel, which covers over thirty years of my life. I wanted to make a film that would have been like a walk through my archives. But then I had a heart attack, and just as I was being taken to hospital, a crack appeared on the wall of my studio. These two events triggered a film (Ghosts from the Past) that was somewhat different, slightly deviated, dictated by the fear of dying and being buried. As always, it was my friends, my films and the women who saved me. Here, the background singer – the chorus of tragedy – is Fanchon Daemers, and my guardian angel – my midwife – is Sarah Moon Howe, who co-directed the film.
-Boris Lehman