Nicknamed “the mother of Israel”, the Greek city of Thessaloniki was for centuries home to a large diaspora of Sephardic Jews until the outbreak of the Second World War. In the winter of 1943, the Nazi regime dispatched Eichmann’s deputies to Greece where they quickly and rigorously carried out their programme of ghettoisation and deportation which led to the extermination of more than 90 percent of the city’s Jewish population. I Poli ke i Poli aims to reconstruct this dramatic history through six intertwined chapters drawn from the lives and perils of Thessaloniki’s Jewish community. Filmmakers Christos Passalis and Syllas Tzoumerkas, who previously collaborated as director and actor respectively on The Miracle of the Sargasso Sea, were both born in Thessaloniki in 1978. For this unique project, which initially saw the light of day as a museum installation in their native town, they have created an enigmatic, multi-character narration. As we wander through a blend of last century and contemporary Thessaloniki, we discover echoes of a lost, multi-cultural Eden and the intense pain that today’s inhabitants have inherited. If embraced, this is a shattering experience.
