Discussed in this essay: The Klezmer Project, dir. Leandro Koch and Paloma Schachmann. 2023. 117 minutes.

Adentro mío estoy bailando, or The Klezmer Project, the first feature film from Leandro Koch and Paloma Schachmann, begins in darkness. A cacophony of rushing wind, indistinct chants and murmurs, birdsong, rumbling traffic, and the keening of assorted instruments eventually harmonizes into a klezmer fiddle tune, which will serve as the film’s central motif. Perhaps, this opening seems to suggest, history’s noise and the chaos of the contemporary might yet resolve into the clear melody of a diasporic sensibility. But the film promptly dashes any hope of easy coherence or straightforward continuity: Out of the blackness—as if emerging from the obscurity of the long-ago past—a voice speaks over the fiddling to address the audience in Yiddish, promising us a tale “about how a whole people decided to turn its back on its history.”

The film that follows, which won the Berlinale’s GWFF Best First Feature Award in February 2023 and has since played at festivals across Europe and the Americas, is both a search for that history and a subtle effort to complicate the way such quests are usually understood. At the center of its vertiginously layered world is the story of two Jews falling in love with one another and, simultaneously, with Jewish cultural tradition—of Leandro (played by Koch), a wedding videographer in Buenos Aires, and the fake documentary project about klezmer that he invents to seduce Paloma (played by Schachmann), a klezmer clarinetist whom he meets at a Jewish wedding where each has been hired to work. The pair soon lead the audience on a journey to capture klezmer performances in Argentina and in the Carpathian Mountains of Ukraine, Romania, and Moldova. Along the way, their pilgrimage is repeatedly interrupted by the recitation of a seeming folktale, first introduced after the opening din, that unfolds as a strange inversion of the main narrative. This Yiddish fable concerns Yankel, a lowly, orphaned gravedigger who falls for Taibele, the rabbi’s learned daughter; to court her, he pretends to be a secret scholar, and then begins frantically reading and preaching from the only book in his grandmother’s house: A Short Treatise on God, Man and His Well-Being by the excommunicated philosopher Baruch Spinoza. If Leandro and Paloma’s story is a tale of excavating the traditions of the past, this other romance turns on an embrace of heretical modernity, as Yankel seduces Taibele with Spinoza’s iconoclastic notions and they both abandon shtetl life.

The dissonance between these narrative strands is just one indication of the film’s interest in unsettling the question of Jews’ relationship to their history. Although the promotional material for Adentro mío estoy bailando references the sentimental trope of a “search for a vanished culture”—the engine of contemporary schlock ranging from Everything Is Illuminated to Treasure—the film itself deconstructs rather than affirms such clichés. Rather than depicting Yiddishkeit as a lost artifact of some golden age of the shtetl, it draws inspiration from Yiddish culture’s historic hybridity, grounded in the diversity of transnational, diasporic experience, to fashion itself as a hybrid work in its own right, suffused with a rich and destabilizing irony, by turns playful and mournful. Fiction and fact mingle as everyone plays a version of themselves. Even the Yiddish tale is not the nostalgic artifact it initially seems: While clearly made in the mold of classic Yiddish folklore, the story is, as Koch and Schachmann admitted in press interviews, a novel invention—something they co-created, just like the film itself.

Yet another generative dissonance emerges from the semantic gap between the Spanish and English titles. Adentro mío estoy bailando—“inside myself, I’m dancing”—foregrounds subjective experience. The Klezmer Project, though seemingly more objective, threatens to collapse the film’s fictional space because it is also the title of the characters’ failed documentary. Ultimately, the film lives in the place where these titles overlap: The gerund of “bailando” and the active, unfinished connotations of “project” indicate its focus on the work of the present. Although the film does contend with the losses of the past—the destruction of Yiddish culture first by the Shoah and, then, ironically, by the State of Israel—it proves far more interested in the survival of the klezmer tradition, and in the Romani musicians who have become its keepers in Eastern Europe. By enabling the rediscovery of a world not only before but also on the other side of catastrophe, Adentro mío estoy bailando offers itself as a melancholically hopeful work about how a culture might resonate beyond its progenitors.

The film is thus not only a moving love story, mystery, and road movie, but an investigation of received history and a search for new modes of cultural belonging. Though filmed well before the genocide in Gaza, it has particular resonance in a moment when many Jews feel the urgent need to develop robust alternatives to the death-dealing ethnonationalism that has become disturbingly central to contemporary Jewishness. In its variegated textures and genres, Koch and Schachmann’s film insists on the hybridity and mutability of identity, rejecting both the violent rigidity of Zionism and the futile, sentimental dream of recovering some vanished Yiddish diasporic past. In its meandering tale, full of disappointments and surprises, it suggests an elusive yet rigorous ethic of diasporism—one that is not only multinational but also multicultural, and which recognizes the ongoing, overlapping influences that actually constitute what we call culture and history, art and life.