Kurdish-Swiss director Mano Khalil reflects on the 1965 Czech film Obchod na korze (The Shop on Main Street)
I grew up in Syrian Kurdistan and loved going to the cinema as a boy but never had enough money to see all the films I wanted. I developed a strategy to get into the cinema: I’d wait outside until the queue had gone in. One usher was left at the door. I’d offer him a quarter of the ticket price to let me in, he’d take the money and say, “Go inside quickly”. I always missed the beginning of the film – but I got to see four films for the price of one!
The cinema opened up other worlds to me. Outside it was hot, dry and desert. Inside there were green trees and people in capes flying.
Mano Khalil
In 1986 I went to film school in Czechoslovakia. The first film I watched in Czech, without subtitles, was The Shop on Main Street, directed by Ján Kadár and Elmar Klos. It really touched me. I saw it three times.
The film is set in Bratislava during the Nazi occupation. It is about an elderly Jewish woman who owns a button shop; it is requisitioned by the Nazis and handed over to a non-Jew. It stars Jozef Kroner as the carpenter Tóno Brtko who takes over her shop. Ida Kaminska is the Jewish shop-keeper. There is a lovely relationship between the characters.
It’s a powerful film and expresses the idea that although youmight be a ‘small’ person you can still do something to help someone. It is not really about the Holocaust. It’s about how a human being can brutally turn against his own neighbour.
Arriving back in Syria after film school, I was arrested because a magazine caption had referred to me as “a Kurdish student from Syria”. I was imprisoned briefly in Damascus and afterwards Switzerland gave me asylum. Today my people, the Kurds, are facing fascism. My new film Neighbours touches on the history of the Jews in Syria but it’s really about the anti-humanity of the Assad regime. Around 70,000 Jews lived in Syria until the 1980s, existing peacefully alongside Christians and Kurds. In my city there was a Jewish bazaar; we knew many Jewish families. But once nationalism arrived it killed Jewish existence in Syria. In Neighbours you see the child protagonist, Sero, light the Sabbath candles for his Jewish neighbours – as my own sister and brother had done for our neighbours.
The film has been invited to a big Arab festival – it’s an exciting step. As the communist regime fell in Czechoslovakia, Václav Havel said: “Love and truth will win out over injustice”. I believe it always does.
Interview by Rebecca Taylor
Header photo: Ida Kami ska and Jozef Kroner in The Shop on Main Street, courtesy of David Wilkinson
The UK Jewish Film Festival runs 4-18 November. JR’s editor Rebecca Taylor interviews Mano Khalil live at a screening of Neighbours on Wednesday 10 November. See ukjewishfilm.org for info. This article appears in the Autumn 2021 issue of JR.