Rachel Gutgarts

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“How do you sing a song to the lord in a strange land?” This passage from psalms 137:4 followed by the famous passage, ‘If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning’ was the catalyst that sent me into this project, after leaving Jerusalem, my hometown, in order to immigrate to France. 

At first, I imagined that the strange land described in the passage would be, for me, France. I would come back to Jerusalem, to create and collect a few hand-crafted relics, in order to sing that song. 

When I arrived to Jerusalem, in the midst of the ongoing war, looking at the place I grew up from an outsider perspective, noticing all historical and religious narratives are drafted to war and radical messianic ideas, I discovered that in fact, the land that I thought I knew, became estranged to me, and the question, how do you sing a song to the lord in this land, remained an open one.

Rachel Gutgarts

Born in 1992 in Jerusalem, experimental filmmaker Rachel Gutgarts is a graduate of the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design. My graduation film, *A Love Letter to the One I Made Up* (6', 2017), has been screened at numerous festivals. In 2020, I moved to France to produce VIA DOLOROSA (10’, 2023) with MIYU Productions. After the premiere *of VIA DOLOROSA* at the Semaine de la Critique at the Cannes Film Festival in 2023, I began my studies at Le Fresnoy – Studio national des arts contemporains (Vera Molnár cohort, 2023–2025). There I produced *HOW DO YOU SING A SONG TO THE LORD IN A STRANGE LAND*, a multimedia installation presented as part of the Panorama 26 exhibition in Tourcoing.

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