1341 Framim Mehamatzlema Shel Micha Bar-Am

"Like the best films about photography, 1341 Framim makes a simple but crucial choice to put cinema in the service of still images, poising itself on the line that separates documentary from the much less frequent form of the still image film, between the evanescence and persistence of a frame.
The career of Israeli photo reporter Micha Bar-Am, born in Berlin in 1930, thus becomes an assembly of iconic snapshots, enlargements and contact sheets which serve as the score for two voices: Micha, who is struggling with his memories as some remain while others fade, and his wife Orna, the assiduous curator of his archive and custodian of the memory that he is losing in his old age.
However, forgetting is also a choice, given the events and atrocities Bar-Am immortalised by documenting the history of Israel including Adolf Eichmann’s trial in 1961, the Six-Day War in 1967, the Yom Kippur War in 1973 and the massacre of Sabra and Shatila in 1982.
But whether they’re confronting the horrors of war or moments of family life, his pictures always reveal his ability to turn photography into a refined language of the gaze and, in the background, as the constant protagonist, a land without peace."
(Berlinale)