About The Film

SONG SEARCHER

Song Searcher, a historical documentary film made in 2019-2021, never fails to produce a strong emotional response from the most varied of international audiences. Part biography, part Holocaust testimonial and part mystery investigation, it recounts the true life story of Moyshe Beregovsky, a man who saved the Yiddish musical patrimony of Ukraine. Following in the great ethnographer’s footsteps around Ukraine and using heartbreaking testimony of the few survivors remaining, the film reveals the tragic fate of those places where he collected his music before the war and of the people who played and sang for him. Those old Jewish communities were destroyed by the Nazis but their melodies miraculously survived in Beregovsky's archive, even though he himself was subsequently arrested and imprisoned in the Stalinist gulag. This incredible patrimony, published decades after his death, became a source of reference and interpretation for dedicated musicians around the world, who perform their own versions of these tunes for diverse, enthusiastic audiences in hope of reviving the centuries-old European klezmer tradition that was almost entirely destroyed by the tragic events of the last century.

But how did this tradition evolve in the first place? What were its origins and sources? How did it happen that Ashkenazi Jews developed a musical language so clearly distinct from their non-Jewish neighbors, while continuing to exchange some melodies and performance practices with them?

And why for centuries did this music have such a fundamental place in the life of Yiddish speakers? Is there a connection between the prominent role that traditional music, sacred and secular, always played in Jewish communities and the sudden explosion of Jewish musical talent in the late 19th- and 20th centuries, which first appeared in the prestigious Russian conservatories and, later, on the world's great classical stages?

In order to find the answers to these and so many other fascinating questions often asked by Song Searcher audiences, the film’s producer, V & Co, feels it necessary to make a sequel to the Beregovsky saga, this time with traditional Jewish music as its main protagonist. Igor Polesitsky, a prominent Ukrainian-Italian classical musician with deep klezmer roots, who was already featured in Song Searcher as a lifelong student and practitioner of Beregovsky’s heritage, will team up with Walter Zev Feldman, a major Jewish music scholar, and musician at the source of the modern American klezmer revival movement, to embark on a voyage of discovery. Together they will explore the fascinating and colorful world of modern-day klezmorim, examine the features of traditional Ashkenazi dance, talk to Jewish history scholars and musicologists and meet world-famous classical musicians. Most importantly, they will listen to and discuss a variety of great Jewish music in order to unearth its true meaning for us not only as a fundamental spiritual and emotional feature of our past but of our present and future.