Film Recommendation: The Euphoria of Being (2019)
“The fact of existence is in itself euphoric” – says Éva Fahidi, a Hungarian-Jewish Holocaust survivor in Réka Szabó’s 2019 multi-award-winning documentary film, The Euphoria of Being. As a deeply moving narrative, which deals with the representation of the unrepresentable, Szabó’s directorial debut not only thematises but performs ageing, personal and cultural trauma through bodies. The story focuses on Éva, who is in her early nineties and gets an opportunity from the director of the film to tell her life story on the stage, in a dance theatre performance. Regardless of her age and her inexperience on stage, Éva bravely accepts the challenge. The Euphoria of Being showcases the preparation phase of the performance and the opening night as well, nevertheless, the film is much more than a making-of film.
Éva Fahadi was 18 years old when she and her family were deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp. According to her, at least 49 of her family members died during the Holocaust – including her mother, her father and her little sister. After her return, Éva did not speak about her traumatic experiences – up until 2003. In that year, she revisited the concentration camp, which catalysed a lot of memories and most importantly: the will to tell her story. This resulted in an autobiographical book called Anima rerum: a dolgok lelke (2005). The book was later translated into multiple languages – the English translation came out in 2020 with the title, The Soul of Things.
The Euphoria of Being as a documentary film, which deals with traumatic experience through movement and dance, emphasizes a new tendency in Hungarian documentary filmmaking, namely that trauma processing becomes connected to art and art therapy – other examples include Judit Oláh’s 2020 Return to Epipó and Ábel Visky’s 2020 Tales from the Prison Cell. However, it must be noted that the dance theatre performance presented in Szabó’s film also addresses ageing and not merely through its main character, who is 90 years old. On the stage, Éva gets a partner, a young professional dancer, Emese Cuhorka, who helps Éva to give shape and form to her memories. Therefore, Emese has multiple roles in the play: sometimes she is Éva’s young alter ego, but sometimes she portrays Éva’s little sister or father. Their beautiful, often symmetrical choreographies seem to unite temporal dichotomies that are not permeable otherwise: past and present, youth and old age become accessible at the same time. Éva’s ageing body transforms into a visual signifier of cultural memory and trauma, while Emese’s young body – following the performance’s logic – is solely activated by the main protagonist’s mental journey.
Regarding its representational mode connected to ageing, The Euphoria of Being displays what Linn Sandberg calls affirmative ageing. Here, ageing is not conceived as a success, nor as a decline narrative, but as a process that entails becoming different. This idea becomes palpable in the film with the characterization of Éva, who outgrows the one-sided categories provided by the notions of success and decline. She is strong and fragile simoultaneously. Her determination and work ethic refute the stigmatizing practice by which ageing people are usually excluded from dance theatre, but the film does not present her as a superhuman, who has absolutely no limitations during the process. The physical and verbal elements of the performance occasionally cause her trouble, which ultimately will be vanquished due to Éva’s persistence. Furthermore, the dance theatre performance (the choreography and the costume design in particular) is able to portray Éva as a woman, who has not been dispossessed of her gender and sexuality – contradicting the conventional genderless representation of the ageing body. The intimate camerawork enhances this effect as Éva’s close-ups reveal her skin and her tender body movements without any reservation.
What makes The Euphoria of Being so prominent, is that it enables her ageing protagonist to become active on the screen. Éva has authority in the project, she is a creative collaborator, just as the director and her professional dance partner. The memories of the ageing mind and body are acted out dynamically in a predominantly non-verbal manner, exceeding the barriers of the spoken language. Szabó’s film reaffirms that Éva Fahidi – who started to build up her cultural legacy at the age of 80 – throughout her later life dismantled many limiting preconceptions about old age. Now, two months after she passed away, one thing is crystal clear: Éva’s optimism and perseverance will be missed and shall be followed.
Image credit: The Euphoria of Being (A létezés eufóriája), directed by Réka Szabó, produced by Campfilm Production, The Symptoms, 4Cut Post Digital, Pom’Zed, 2019.
Written by: Boglárka Angéla Farkas
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