The Garden that Floated Away

Director: Ruth Walk
Israel 2005 54 mins
Language: Hebrew/Polish with English subtitles

For 45 years, in a modest flat in Holon (near Tel Aviv) Ida Fink wrote in Polish
about her childhood memories - of the years in which she and her sister spent
under false identities in Poland and Germany, trying to survive the horrors of the
Second World War. Never giving up her mother tongue, or her old Polish
typewriter, Fink’s acclaimed novels and short stories (A Scrap of Time,
The Journey, Traces) were praised for their unique attentiveness to the
complexity of life as it was lived in the darkest days of our history.
The visual and lyrical qualities of her stories are translated into this cinematic
portrait of a writer who has retained her sensitivity and poetic talent through the
horrors of loss, fear, hatred and betrayal. Allowing us a unique insight into her
current life, the film follows the remarkable relationship between the two sisters,
now in their 80s, as they move into a flat together in Tel Aviv.

The film will be introduced by the scholar and writer Eva Hoffman (Lost in Translation; After Such Knowledge; Shtetl)