Testimony was nominated for the Temple of Heaven Award and was nominated in Venice Horizon Unit.

A feature film jointly produced by Austria and Israel was selected for the Tiantan Award, the main competition unit of this year’s Beijing International Film Festival. The film was written by writer and director Amichai Greenberg and tells the story of a strict and pious Jewish scholar seeking the truth.

　

Lengsdorf, a fictional city in the opening of Testimony, comes from the work Extinction Angel by Nobel Prize winner elfriede jelinek. The story background of the film is a tragedy described in the book: In Lengsdorf during World War II, German general Rehnitz ordered the massacre of 200 Hungarian Jews and brutally persecuted about 60 laborers in nearby cities, creating a massacre that shocked the world.

　

The hero of this film, Yule, is a Jerusalem scholar living in modern times. His job is to study the massacre in this history. As a Jew, he has a mixed feeling about this matter, so he came to Lengsdorf for field investigation to find out the truth.

　

In Lengsdorf, Yule began to investigate, collecting information about the Holocaust and trying to find clues. But before the truth he expected appeared, another one really collided and overturned him. In a dusty file, he saw his mother’s photo, but in the name column, it was a strange name.

　

He never doubted his identity, but the hints found in the document told him that the identity he had always claimed might be a mistake, and that Yule might even be, not even a Jew.

　

The film adopts an extremely restrained technique, using a lot of blank pictures, aiming at the gray and cold sky or recording the barren land, as if the film were having a calm dialogue with the audience, and as if everything in the world had become a link of questioning.This scholar is over half a century old, but he is forced to face himself now. His beliefs are likely to be alienated from him because of his identity.When judging people and judging the truth must rely on external factors such as education and hometown, what is the truth?

　

Testimony uses realistic natural light and infectious soundtrack to make the whole film calm and restrained. Through Yule’s perspective, the search for truth and the judgment of self-dimension are launched. The authoritative Jewish scholar who studies the Holocaust, like ordinary people, always relies on the historical dimension to judge himself. But when he gets the truth, we should question whether history may have no truth.

　

At last year’s Venice Film Festival, "Testimony" was nominated for best film in the Horizon Unit, which proved the success of director Amichai Greenberg’s debut. After receiving a favorable comment in Venice, the film was invited to the St. Louis International Film Festival, and this year it was successfully shortlisted for the "Temple of Heaven Award", the main competition unit in Beijing International Film Festival.

　

This is a story about finding the truth. From an individual scholar to a big history itself, truth is a scarce substance, which loses its original shape with the passage of time, and the truth appears in reality in various vague ways."Testimony" is a film with hidden needles in the cotton. What it wants to say is not the truth but the way to verify the truth.