The Exit of the Trains

A documentary essay composed entirely of archive photographs and documents of the first big massacre of the Jews in Romania: in the city of Iași, on the 29th of June 1941, more than 10,000 Jews were killed - first by bullets, than by asphyxiation in freight trains.

The film, which is an attempt to use the montage of archive materials in order to offer a deep and special view of History, has two parts: The first part of the film could be titled “the encyclopedia of the dead”: photographs of the people who were eventually killed by the Romanian army and by civilians are accompanied by voices who recite the documents related to their fate in the massacre: witness accounts, testimonies from the post-war trials, interviews with survivors, private diaries etc. The second part, shorter, represents a montage of the remaining photographs of the actual massacre (taken mostly by the German soldiers who were in town).