A ruffled young man, at first unrecognizable as a ghost, turns up in Neukölln and visits an old friend. The two grew up in the same house. Now one of them is a broker and is selling this very building, destined for demolition as the area becomes ever more gentrified. In the meantime a group of young people is on a journey through the night, in search of the "spirit of Neukölln", themselves and other fallen angels.
Neukölln Wind (2016) Directed Senny Rapoport
I’ve always moved from place to place, ever since I was 7 and my parents moved from Kazakhstan to Israel. When I was 12, we moved to Tel-Aviv. I must have assimilated constant moving into my system. Controlled by this nature I rumbled between parallel classes in school and between units in the army. That movement was not programmed or directed toward a goal. It was an instinctive, chaotic movement only guided by the impossibility to stay in the same situation. I never learned to live in the same place. I tried different jobs but couldn't fit into any rigid frame. Finally, I moved to Spain to study photography, then found a journal dedicated to travel that payed me for reports from different countries. Quickly I understood that the places which interested me most did not interest the journal and vice-versa. I quit and moved to Naples. Living there I began to realize that the medium of photography didn’t fully express my imagination. The mysterious ancient allies of Napoli and the poor existence of its inhabitants, often tending towards criminality, created in my mind stories that I could not fully express with still images. I started writing. Then I applied to a film school. During my second year I shot and edited my first short film “Souvenir” and participated with it in the Naples Film Festival. Later I was involved in a documentary project that brought me to live with the Bedouins in the Negev desert. By the end of 2011 I moved to Berlin. In Berlin I shot three short films and finally produced “Neukölln Wind” in collaboration with a large group of underground artists, actors and filmmakers operating under the name NK44 Artcollective. The movie premiered in Germany on the 7th of January 2016. I left Berlin in the same year. My next stop was Paris where I met the producer Cedomir Kolar, a man I've always admired for his body of work. For quite some time now I have been carrying an idea for a film to be shot in Israel. I have always associated the picture with such classics as Train of Life or No Man’s Land, both produced by Cedomir. In 2019 we started collaborating on Operation Qassam Aksana.
