critics
“…This film is like the Rhine: It starts slowly and inconspicuously, I first had to find my way around it, had real problems not to get out of it internally, but from minute to minute it got better, i.e. more compelling, more interesting, more profound, broader, dragged me along…
…As I said: an incredibly great film!”
“Another film about the Holocaust? Hasn’t everything that there is to say on the subject already been said in Claude Lanzmann’s monumental work “Shoah” (1985)? If you think so, you should definitely watch Offer Avnon's documentary. In it, the Israeli director, who lived in Germany for ten years and now lives back in his hometown of Haifa, shows why the critical examination of the past is more necessary than ever - not with a raised finger, but quietly and thoughtfully about his environment and himself questioning.”
“The Rhine Flows to the Mediterranean Sea” attempts the Sisyphean task of a localization between philo- and anti-Semites, the anxious and the indifferent, those who remember and those who suppress. Not an image or sentence that doesn’t trigger a multitude of associations. The devil is in the detail: This film opens our eyes to this. What are the traumas that perpetuate the Holocaust, which the filmmaker, son of a Polish survivor, was unable to forget, “never, not for a single day” in all those years in Germany? What mechanisms of suppression are at work among the relatives of the perpetrators, of the victims? How is the perception, the mind, the memory of the individual shaped by belonging to a nation, a religion or political group? Offer Avnon gives fragmentary answers and each raises new questions. The search for the “uncanny” he began with his film is far from over.
“How do you talk about the Shoah trauma that still affects the family in the third generation? With a lot of time, calm and openness, the Israeli director's answer could be!”
“The Israeli opening film “The Rhine Flows into the Mediterranean” by Offer Avnon transferred one of the most important contemporary debates into the sphere of art and onto the screen: It is a Jew’s look back at ten years in Germany, where he learned the “beautiful language of former arch-enemy” and cannot forget the Shoah for a day.
Conversations, still lifes, city and landscape images collected over several years lead into a ghostly inbetween - in the middle of the poles of anti- and philo-Semitism, denial and overemphasis. This is also a film that belongs on the big screen with its artful, contrapuntal interweaving of image and text. And the cinema and its audience involuntarily bond together in a common discourse.” (Translated from German)
““...The film is not about big stories, though, it is about small recollections; slight glances and nuanced testimonies. It offers a look at people who veer between positive and gentle and others who are still carrying anger or anti-Semitism. It offers fragments and clues rather than answers, which in the end perhaps reflects the underlying and continuing complexities of response to the Shoah…”