PLACE
Place is a VR experience that revives the Great Synagogue of Aleppo through digital walls and memories.
Place was first shown in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem from June to December 2022 and will be touring international museums and festivals.
First prototypes of the project have been shown at the film festivals DOK Leipzig and Docaviv in 2018.
Creators:
Avi Dabach, Harmke Heezen,
Judith Manassen-Ramon, Mike Robbins
Place is a co-production of Micha’s Films
and High Road Stories.
Reviews
Tablet - by Matti Friedman
The Jewish Chronicle - by Jotam Confino
Does a virtual place make you feel you’ve been there,
or does it emphasize its absence?
November 1947: Sarah Shammah makes a dangerous journey back to her hometown of Aleppo, Syria, to meticulously photograph every corner of the centuries-old Great Synagogue she grew up in. She has an emotional and almost mystical attachment to the place. Days later, as the partition plan for Palestine is approved by the United Nations, the synagogue is destroyed in riots. Sarah manages to escape with her negatives.
Place uses Sarah’s smuggled photographs to take you back to one sunny winter day in the life of this ancient building. As you explore, its denizens share their stories about the invisible strings that tie them to the space, bringing it to life with fragments of their existence. Place is like stepping inside an old, cherished piece of film, with all the grain and softness that human memories are made of.
Sarah was a woman acting in a male dominated society: the Middle East, the Jewish community, and the synagogue itself, were ruled by men. But she managed to do an impossible thing for a woman of her time. What started as an effort to show the synagogue to the world, turned into the definitive documentation of it, using the most effective medium she had - photography.
Within Place, these photos are the building blocks for the most effective medium we have in our time - virtual reality. It’s a bittersweet feeling of being there, and being painfully aware that this place is gone, for those who miss it and for those who didn’t know they did.
