The Pageant, dir. Eytan İpeker, Documentary, 83 min, 2020

 

Every year since 2011, a unique beauty contest takes place in Haifa. The contestants are female survivors of the Holocaust. In the midst of this flashy spectacle sponsored by an Evangelical Christian organization, the personal traumas of the survivors remain as deep as ever. A documentary about how memory, politics and spectacle are interconnected.

 

​

 

Visions du Réel - International Feature Competition (World Premiere)

Sarajevo Film Festival - Documentary Competition

Jerusalem International Film Festival

Odessa International Film Festival - European Documentary Competition

Rhode Island International Film Festival

Istanbul Film Festival - National Documentary Competition

Antalya Golden Orange Film Festival - National Documentary Competition

Human Rights Film Festival Lugano

Muestra de Cine de Lanzarote

Documentarist

İstanbul Modern Sinema

​

​

REVIEWS

​

"the film accuses without a word, in a very efficient and intelligent way, the radical strangeness — not to say the sweet obscenity — of its subject."

Le Monde (Jacques Mandelbaum) - in French

 

"offers a complex and nuanced look at the annual Miss Holocaust Survivor event."

Cineuropa (twitter)

 

"an eye for detail, especially uncomfortable ones"

Cineuropa's review (Marta Bałaga)

 

"the movie’s lack of final ethical conclusion, in a situation where no definitive or even partial judgment seems possible, is what lingers"

Filmmaker Magazine (Vadim Rizov)

​

"The Pageant reveals the inner mechanisms of the contest by gently depicting its visible manifestations. (...) The film keeps its focus resolutely on the 'spectacle' of the contest where the sufferings are being made to compete."

Altyazı Film Journal (Fırat Yücel) - in Turkish

​

"Ipeker’s approach could not be better suited to his film’s flabbergasting subject", "profoundly ironic editing work"

Ubiquarian (Bénédicte Prot),

​

"Ipeker deliberately creates associations that make you shiver"

critic.de (Anne Küper) - in German

 

"The Pageant (...) is able to use its feature-length to raise more of the troubling psychological aspects of the event, in a non-conclusive, humbly observational manner that never presumes to condemn the choices of its subjects."

Modern Times Review (Carmen Gray)

 

Listed as one of the "Best Films of 2020" by Michael Sicinski