The Klezmer Project

Probably Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan offer the best bets for finding live klezmer music on any average night. Instead, Leandro sets out looking for it in the Eastern European countries where it originated. That might sound logical, but the Holocaust and subsequent Communist oppression almost entirely decimated the local Jewish population and its culture. Leandro’s underwriters are not too thrilled, but he devotes more energy to impressing Paloma, the Klezmer clarinetist he fell for, in Leandro Koch & Paloma Schachmann’s hybrid documentary, The Klezmer Project, which releases tomorrow wherever you rent movies.

Initially, Koch never really thought much of his Jewish grandmother’s Jewish roots in Bessarabia, until he videotaped a wedding where Paloma’s Argentinean Klezmer band played. To impress her, he hatches a scheme to make a documentary about Klezmer in Romania and Ukraine, coinciding with her own research trip with American ethnomusicologist Bob Cohen. Somehow, his old school acquaintance agrees to produce, securing funding from Austrian public television.

The problem is there is no klezmer to be found, which does not surprise Cohen. He rather expected it. Instead, Cohen shows the Argentineans the lasting influence of klezmer on the local non-Yiddish musical traditions. They find many traditional musicians still playing the old klezmer songs—but they are not klezmer bands.

Cohen is a fascinating lecturer and story-teller, who likens the music they find to decayed fossils that are defined by the negative space they leave behind in rock formations. As it happens, one place where they can still find those traces is Romania’s Iza Valley, where the people “retreated into tradition” as a “defense mechanism” against the Communist regime.

As a parallel narrative, Paloma’s academic friend, Dr. Perla Sneh, narrates the story of Yankel the incompetent grave-digger, who falls in love with the Rabbi’s beautiful daughter, Teibele, but his ignorant attempts to feign Talmudic learning produce disastrous results. Leandro is more than sufficiently self-aware to recognize his similarities with cringy Yankel. Paloma gets it too, but somehow, she starts to feel something like affection for him.

This film will be a challenge to market, but it deserves a chance. The meta-layers will likely confuse viewers and the dearth of legit klezmer might alienate its presumed target audience. However, there is a great deal of appealing Eastern European folk music, from bands that are mostly unheard outside a few miles of their home territories. Yet, their performances are often stirring and soulful.

Perhaps cutting some of the introductory scenes in Argentina might not have been a terrible idea. The nearly two-hour running time could stand pruning in general. Arguably, Koch also establishes his own nebbish awkwardness a little too thoroughly. It is hard to get what Schachmann possibly sees in him. However, the Scholem Aleichem-esque tale of Yankel and Teibele (which is initially narrated by the old Devil himself) truly evokes the vibe of the old shtetl world.

This is an unusually enlightening film that fully contextualizes the disappearance of klezmer and Yiddish culture in Eastern Europe. It also clearly conveys a sense of what was lost, both for the surviving Jewish population and the older gentiles, who remain keenly aware of what is missing. Highly recommended for viewers with healthy, grown-up attention spans, The Klezmer Project releases tomorrow (2/25) on VOD platforms.