The Cellar

About one year after the Eichmann trial, director Natan Gross, known for the original docudrama Undzere Kinder (Our Children, 1948, co-dir. with Shaul Goskind), delves into the traumas of the Holocaust for the first time in Israeli film. Written by Gross and Shimon Yisraeli, a pioneer of one-man show premieres on the Israeli stage, the script includes real-life events from the director’s life.

The film features the night shift of a construction site guard, Emmanuel, who is brought back to events from his past: before, during, and after his deportation to Dachau. In this one-actor film, Yisraeli plays Emmanuel at different ages and other central characters of his life. With its expressionist aesthetic, this low-budget film reflects that “[being] traumatized is precisely to be possessed by an image or even” (Cathy Caruth, 1995), but also explores the crucial dialectic between the image of the self and interactions with others in the act of remembering. 

This groundbreaking film is the first in Israeli cinema to adopt the survivor’s perspective and disrupt the collective narrative of salvation from the trauma upon arriving in Israel. The Cellar won Best Feature Film Suitable for Young People at the Berlin International Film Festival in 1963.