Regina

synopsis

This film about Regina Jonas asks two questions – can a woman become a rabbi, and how to film a documentary about the first female rabbi in history, when the only image we have of her is one single photograph? Using an abundance of archival footage, often played at a slower speed, the director brings to life the atmosphere of Berlin in the first half of the 20th century.

The voiceovers of letters and documents are read not by actors, but by the director’s acquaintances who themselves lived through the Holocaust – as if experience could be imprinted onto a photograph just as well as onto the human voice.

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