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Boston Jewish Film Festival, 2001 My Babushka: Searching Ukrainian Identities
By Linda Dittmar Barbara Hammer's My Babushka is a courageous account of her journey to the Ukraine in search of a family's and a people's past. We see Hammer meet relatives in her grandmother's village, interview feminist and gay activists, record public ceremonies and ethnic celebrations, and visit Babi Yar. Steeped in visual appeal, this film is nonetheless a poignant reminder that, once uprooted, visitors remain outsiders. One may gather fragments, but the true meaning of "family" and "Ukrainian" remain elusive. Toward the end of My Babushka, Hammer asks her travel companion whether the project was, in fact, a healing one. "Just by virtue of our coming, by virtue of having done this project, it is an act of healing," the woman responds. While there is much truth to this answer, in some ways there can be no full healing, as the section on the BabiYar massacre suggests. That which has been lost lives only in surviving fragments and recollections. Hammer's film says as much, with its restless, probing camera; its piled-up segments; and the dissolving and overlapping transitions that enact its search for traces of lives that can be neither captured nor erased. |