Crying Will Get You Nowhere is the title of the documentary film, which follows the way of the elderly lady fighting her traumas with the help of dancing.
How can a Holocaust survivor live a full life? What keeps her moving in the times of pain and sorrow? Why did she decide to dance her traumas away? The answers lie somewhere behind the title, the unique performance and the honest happiness of Éva Fahidi.
Photo: Csaba Mészáros
“Éva Fahidi is 90 years old. She has no track record whatsoever as a professional dancer. Yet next week, for the first time in her life, she is stepping on the stage to dance in front of an audience on the Home Stage of Vígszínház Theater in Budapest” – the organiser dance ensemble, Tünet Együttes introduces the debut.
The documentary film condenses the rehearsals for the new dance project in 50 minutes, during which episodes of Éva’s life story and character unfold, joined with the process of preparation for the premiere. The director and the cast of the film started a crowdsourcing campaign, in order to collect money from donations to complete the shooting, and fund the post-production of the film.
On her journey to the stage, Éva is accompanied by the dancer Emese Cuhorka, 60 years younger than her, simultaneously cast in the role of the young Éva, her early-lost mother, her younger sister, and her never-born child.
Éva is passionately searching for joy, Emese wants to redeem everyone. Éva doesn’t like saying goodbye, Emese likes coming home. Their common mother tongue is dancing. Éva is one of the last witnesses. Her preserved clothes from her young ages perfectly fit to Emese.
Photo: Csaba Mészáros
The main question of the performance is if transit exists between the two worlds. Can tragedies be shared in order to remember? Or on the contrary: is it possible for someone with such a background as Éva to understand the problems of a young woman of nowadays?
The director of the play and the film, Réka Szabó has known Éva Fahidi for 20 years, and she has always felt that this lady deserves to be shown to the world, to be known by everyone. Éva was dancing during all of her life, and she is sensitively connected to her own body, having strong physical memories and experience.
Photo: Csaba Mészáros
At the same time, she is a great speaker at lectures, and also the author of several essays and the novel The Soul of Things. These are some of the reasons why she was elected to speak by the side of Angela Merkel at the state celebration in Berlin on the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.
“The old man looks back to his life the same way as a wanderer sees the landscape below him, from the top of a mountain” – writes Éva in her novel. “He sees everything which is closer and which is further away at the same time. For this reason, the time is not in a chronological order anymore in his soul, everything converges.”
“I find it utterly difficult to understand how someone at the age of 90 can remain so active, mischievous, radiant, intellectually fresh, warm-hearted, and bursting with the sheer joy of life after losing her entire family to the Holocaust” – says the director Réka Szabó. “At the risk of sounding blasphemous, I might say she still has her act much more together than I do, at the age of 46. I have always wanted to get to the bottom of her secret, to pilfer from her the Elixir of Eternal Life.”