Brussels Transit is Samy Szlingerbaum’s only full-length film. It tells the story of his parents’ arrival in Belgium in 1947. They were Polish Jews who had spent ten days travelling across Europe by train. Samy was born two years later. The film, spoken in Yiddish, is his mother’s story of their journey and narrates the attempts of the family to build a home, the struggle to find illicit work and their efforts to integrate into the country of their exile, without papers or any knowledge of the language.
“This is the threnody of rootlessness and marginality, set in the neighbourhood of the Brussels Midi Station. ‘their area, their burrow, their kingdom – today I still have the impression that they are camping there’ (S. Szlingerbaum). The 80 minutes of the film avidly probe this past of his mother’s memories via the voice-over, songs, whispered confidences and a handful of fictional scenes also in Yiddish, ‘a language which is dying out as its last speakers are lost in the city,’ in the words of the director.”
René Michelems
“The film opens on a still shot at night, with the lights reflected on the station’s rails, almost imperceptibly stirred by the movement of the locomotive. This evening is the night of the Shoah, from which one must escape, but from which so few did. The whole film is bathed in this poetic expressivity.”
Adolphe Nysenholc
“Following earlier prestigious examples of film-makers such as Marguerite Duras, Szlingerbaum shows the city as it is, while his mother’s story evokes the past. This anachronism creates a distance : the past is dead, and life is a form of perpetual exile.”
Adolphe Nysenholc
“By displaying a preference for long takes, frontal shots, and sound-image disjunctions, Szlingerbaum further distances the film from conventional fictional forms. Reflecting the idiosyncrasies of the narration, some images match it, others do not. These images have a meditative quality, depicting specific incidents but also dwelling on the monotony of daily routine.”
Philip Mosley
“For the poor immigrant population of today, as for Szlingerbaum’s own family in the wake of the Holocaust, the station has a double meaning. As the initial site of a new beginning in a foreign land, it symbolizes a decisive psychological and cultural step forward. Yet the network of rails leading to and from the station also represents an umbilical cord keeping these newcomers in contact, however tangentially, with their places of origin and their past.”
Philip Mosley
“Szlingerbaum’s reflections on next-generational loss and lingering trauma along with aftselokhes cultural continuity also remain achingly relevant. This simultaneously dreamlike and concrete cinematic reconstruction of events after WWII offers viewers a nuanced yet direct and deeply personal perspective of refugee experience and immigrant family life, boasting excellent production values yet filmed on an independent budget.”
Eve Sicular
