Gefilte Fish
Theme and Variations is a stop motion animation that features music by Olivier Messiaen.
Selected ink drawings on paper for the animation and stills:
Gefilte Fish
2022 (January)
Duration 7 minutes
Animation, story and narration by Yuliya Lanina
Music and sound design by Sam Lipman
On its surface, Gefilte Fish is a story of one family meal in the Bronx. That brief moment in time connects past, present, and future, revealing trauma from the Holocaust, incest, and loss of parents -- and the silence that perpetuates the pain.
The animation is dedicated to Lanina grandmother's family who were killed by the Nazis along with 1.6 million Ukrainian Jews. This project sheds light on how survivors’ trauma carries over to next generations, aided by reluctance of the families to deal with uncomfortable dynamics.
With this project Lanina aims to look back at the human catastrophe of the Holocaust through the lens of the children and grandchildren of the survivors. It is a plea to end the silencing of painful truths and to prevent the victims from becoming the victimizers that pass the hurt onto the next generation.
Gefilte Fish won Best International Short Film at Tamuz Shomron Film Festival (Israel) and won an Honorable Mention at the Female Eye Film Festival (Canada).
The project supported in part by Fulbright Austria, MQ21 Artist Residency, Tricky Women Tricky Realities festival, the Cultural Arts Division of the City of Austin Economic Development Department.
ARTWORKS REFERENCED
Bedřich Fritta – Drawings of Theresienstadt ghetto (1943-44)
Murdered in Auschwitz in 1945
Halina Olomucki – "Don’t shoot my mother!" (1941) and “Waiting” (1945)
Prisoner of Majdanek and Auschwitz-Birkenau
Henri Pieck – “Behind Barbed Wire” (1945)
Prisoner of war at Dachau concentration camp
David Friedmann – "Liberation?" (1964)
Prisoner of Łódź and Auschwitz-Birkenau
Zinovi Tolkachev – Drawings of Majdanek and Auschwitz (1945) Soviet-Jewish soldier
Felix Bloch – "Arrival of a Transport, Theresienstadt Ghetto” (1942-1944)
Murdered in Łódź
Hirsch Szylis – “Ghetto Resident with Jewish Badge” (1942), Prisoner of Lodz, Auschwitz, Oranienburg, Flossenburg and Dachau