SD Video. Sony DCR-PC100. Color. 14 min 05 sec. 2024.
My research for this project began during a trip to Germany in 2021. At the time, I had only heard rumors about my family’s origins in a small village called Jebenhausen. Unlike other villages in the southwestern district of Göppingen, Jebenhausen has no plaza, no cuckoo clock shop—just a two-lane road called Böllerstraße, and a Jewish Museum. That museum is where I started my research.
One person in particular caught my interest: my fifth great-grandmother, Yetta Ballenberg (née Rosenheim). She was the youngest of several siblings, the only surviving girl, and the only one who—according to my research—left Jebenhausen for the United States. I learned she once sold hats in Chicago and died in New York. I could not find much more.
That speculative space—between what we know and what we never will—is central to Ashkenazi Jewish identity. I returned to Jebenhausen in 2024 with a camcorder and microphone, now armed with more knowledge: about Yetta, our extended family, their homes, and burial sites. The resulting footage became this short film Boller Street.
Boller Street is an attempt to compress time, linking my return to Germany with Yetta’s departure from it. It’s also about projecting meaning onto a landscape that has purged part of its past. My approach was informed by films like Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, Steve McQueen’s Occupied City, and Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest. These works use images of the present to reflect on the past, revealing histories embedded in place. They tell large stories—of cities, populations, death camps. I wanted to tell a smaller story: a single village that once welcomed my ancestors.
Originally, I wrote a factual script in the style of Occupied City. But my camcorder footage had a very different look, and as I reviewed it, the voice shifted from distanced to personal. I rewrote the script, weaving subjective impressions with research. I had been reading Summer in Baden-Baden by Leonid Tsypkin, which follows a Jewish narrator retracing Dostoevsky’s journey in the same region. Tsypkin’s merging of memory and history inspired this revision.
The resulting film is a hybrid: speculative and historical, subjective and archival. It is a story about Jews, compiled from records kept by Germans, told by a descendant across a 200-year gap. It explores memory as obligation—where catastrophe condenses time, and the past inhabits every present.
Screenings:
I am sending you love from the future. Mandeville Art Gallery. La Jolla, CA. Jan 10 - Feb 9, 2025
(installation images below / seen with painting by John Singletary)
