Remapping the Origins

Remapping the Origins is an essayistic film about the city of Białystok in eastern Poland, a reflection on how to deal with history and memory. Białystok is a formerly pluralistic and revolutionary place, the birthplace of Ludwik Lejzer Zamenhof, a medical doctor known for creating the artificial language Esperanto, and of the film pioneer Dziga Vertov. During the Russian Revolution anarchistic communes emerged, the Nazis built a Jewish ghetto. Johannes Gierlinger's film brings the complex legacy of Białystok into the present and confronts it with current social developments: the insurgence of far right-wing parties. A search for traces in a city that could be exemplary for more than a city, maybe for Europe, maybe for the future.