The exit of the trains (2020)

On June 29, 1941, all the Jewish population of the city of Iasi in Romania was captured and beaten up, their houses and stores were wrecked and looted. Most of the men were forced into sealed trains, where they died of asphyxiation. While the German soldiers did take part in the massacre, the majority of those horrible actions were carried out by the Romanian army, police, and civilians. How to describe - with the help of just one film - the horrendous war crime which had 13 thousand victims? Directors Radu Jude and Adrian Cioflâncã chose a radical method: their three-hour film The Exits of the Trains, which premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in 2020, is composed entirely of archival photographs taken from passports and photo albums, and alphabetically lists the people who were killed. The photographs are accompanied by voices who recite their biographies. Through the monotonous repetition, the authors make the scale of the event palpable. Closer to the film’s finale, after two and a half hours, the film transfers into a completely different visual register.