Brussels-Transit
“Made by 32-year-old Belgian Samy Szlingerbaum (who has collaborated on short films with Chantal Akerman), this first feature has a crystalline originality--not novelty but originality in the purest sense, as if he's invented the one and only way to tell his story....” (Soho Weekly News).
Taking off from his mother's recounting, in Yiddish, of the flight of his family from Poland to Belgium in 1947, Szlingerbaum fills in the story with images--stark, semi-surreal, black-and-white. He begins with images he knows--modern Brussels, the railway station at night with its stragglers and transients--and moves on to a re-creation of his parents and younger brother in transit and in their first years in the new, “temporary” home. Brussels-Transit is a testimony to a phenomenon that Szlingerbaum himself, as the Belgian-born younger son, struggles to understand: that of the diaspora. Forty years have passed since his family arrived in their temporary home. His mother still speaks Yiddish and her house still has the look of a temporary shelter, though the family's living standard has risen steadily. What Szlingerbaum finally reveals is a family in permanent transit.