Yellow Starred Courtyards
Hungary, 2017 | 9 minutes
Testimonies from Hungarian Holocaust survivors given in 1945 are merged with observational images of the present day taken inside former Yellow Starred Buildings where the violence occurred, blurring the line between where history ends and the present day begins.
BACKGROUND
In 1944, the 7th district of Budapest was transformed into a Jewish ghetto. It was a walled-off district where Jews were forced out of their home and crammed into Yellow Starred Buildings before being deported to forced labor and concentration camps.
By the time the ghetto was liberated on January 16, 1945, nearly 50% of the city's Jewish population had died during the Holocaust. When the surviving victims returned, the staff of the Hungarian Jewish relief organization, National Committee for Attending Deportees (DEGOB), recorded the personal stories of approximately 5,000 Hungarian Holocaust survivors.
This short film merges the testimonies of these survivors with observational images of the present day taken inside former Yellow Starred Buildings where the violence occurred. Their haunting historical accounts are read by people from Iran, Brazil, and Indonesia as a way to pay a global tribute to the voices of the past.
Director’s Note
Yellow Starred Courtyards began while I was studying documentary film in Hungary in 2017. I was living in an apartment in the 7th district of Budapest which was, in earlier times, part of the Jewish ghetto. The building was visually unlike any building I had ever lived in before. Incredibly high ceilings, majestic windows, an internal courtyard - aged and worn with time. I couldn't help but wonder about its past, and the lives of others that had once lived there.
I began researching the building and discovered a collection of over 5,000 testimonies of Hungarian Jews the DEGOB collected when survivors returned from concentration camps. With their experience still fresh in mind, those testimonies described, in great detail, the atrocities that had taken place in 1944 when the district had been transformed into the Jewish ghetto. Many accounts had specific locations of where those traumas took place.
Eventually, I found myself in those very courtyards for long periods, reading the testimonies, feeling the scars of the buildings, and the absence of all those lives that had been taken. It became a meditation on the past and present moment.
When I tried to describe this experience to others, words escaped me. So I embarked on transmitting this experience through a short film as a small way of paying tribute to their plight.
CREDITS
Directed by: Christina Agatha Zachariades and Quan Nguyen | Musical Score: Alexander Rodriguez | Voiceover Narration: Setareh Samavi, Tarsila Nakamura, Audy Zandri
The film score was made possible through NYU Production Lab in collaboration with students from the Steinhardt School of Music.