LES DISQUES DE RIVKA

Les Disques de Rivka saw filmmaker Richard Copans return to Lithuania. He had already visited the country in 1999 for his film Racine. When he was looking for a suitable soundtrack, a friend referred him to the record collection of an elderly woman named Rivka. Back then Rivka did not want to lend her records to the director. «I don't trust you», she said. However, Copans continued visiting her again after this first encounter, and a few years later Rivka would not only share her music with him, but also tell him her life story. Raised in a small Lithuanian village, Rivka survived a massacre of the Jewish population in 1941, carried out by those who had lived next-door to the victims for many decades. After the war it was Rivka who took care of a memorial and the memory of the murdered: the small, fenced place in the woods and the memorial stone, set up on Rivka's initiative and captured by Copan's camera in rigid takes, remind us in the present of the horrors of the past.