A pile of boxes containing the belongings of a dead man occupies space in a deposit that needs to be cleared for new uses. What to do with the private property left behind by a man who fought his entire life for collective ownership? Can one person’s utopia be another one’s tragedy? Can one choose their inheritance?
My great uncle, Pesaj Zaskin, was a referent of the Israeli left wing. When I found out that he was about to die, I flew from Argentina to record his testimony. He was the only political activist in my family: frustrated with local antisemitism and the perceived lack of a political path, he became a Marxist-Zionist and in 1952 immigrated to Israel to become a proletarian.
He and his teenage comrades founded a kibbutz, a formerly collectivist community located on the border with the West Bank. Since he didn’t comply with one of the main mandates of his commune — to have children to populate the Promised Land — his inheritance represented a problem to the recently privatized kibbutz: for the first time in its history an outsider had to take care of it. So I returned.
Pesaj and I had planned to go to Pervomaisk, in Ukraine, to make a film about our origins. But he got sick, and we ran out of time. Pervomaisk means the 1st of May, labor day. I managed to go right between the Crimean war and the current invasion by Russia. Its walls speak a language that is strange to me. Still I can hear — or believe I can hear — the echo of a revolutionary promise.
The film interweaves archive footage with Pesach’s testimony, conversations with the kibbutz’s inhabitants and with Arab neighbors, and a series of performances in the public space — water towers and bunkers that become temporary altars where objects that belonged to my great uncle (countless postcards, chess sets, Latin American political posters) find a last resting place.
Argentina, Israel/Palestine, Ukraine: three geographies haunted by the same 20th-century promises. The film moves between them following the trajectory of a life — and the objects that survive it — asking what remains when utopia is privatized, when a commune becomes a settlement, when a revolutionary’s belongings become an inheritance nobody asked for.
