Filming Words – Nurith Aviv: Screenings and Conversations, Day 3

A screening of Words That Remain (2022​) and Bruly Bouabré’s Alphabet (2005) with Nurith Aviv in conversation with Gil Anidjar, Yemane Demissie, Cynthia Madansky, James Redfield, and Moulie Vidas
Co-sponsored by Fordham’s Center for Jewish Studies, Centro Primo Levi, and Fordham’s Center on Religion and Culture

Words That Remain (2022)
What is a mother tongue? In this film six voices call forth memories of the languages that shaped their childhoods: Judaeo-Spanish, Judaeo-Arabic, and Judaeo-Persian—each infused with lexical elements of Hebrew and written in the Hebrew script. Though these languages are fading, their melodies, cadences, and intonations linger, shaping the consciousnesses of those who once heard them in their homes.

Bruly Bouabré’s Alphabet (2005)
What remains of a language when no one is left to speak it? In the Ivory Coast, some 600,000 Bété people communicate mainly in a language that is absent from their schools, overshadowed by the dominance of French. In the 1950s, artist Frédéric Bruly Bouabré sought to change that. He devised hundreds of pictograms, drawn from the simple syllables of Bété, to help his people claim the written word. Now in old age, he reflects on his mission: to craft an African script born from the images of daily life, preserving in symbols what speech alone could not.

Nurith Aviv (Tel Aviv, Mandatory Palestine, 1945) has directed ​​18 documentary films. Her works investigate language and move lyrically through the landscapes, collective myths, and intimate narratives that shape humans’ ways of being together. The first woman to be a director of photography in France, she has shot a hundred fiction and documentary films with directors such as Agnès Varda, Amos Gitai, René Allio, and Jacques Doillon. She has received important prizes, including the Edouard Glissant Prize (2009) and the Grand Prix de l’Académie française (2019). Her works have been shown in multiple retrospectives in Paris, including a week-long one last month. She has been the subject of a movie (Woman with a Camera by Zohar Behrendt, 2023) and now of a book (Filmer la Parole, 2025).

This tribute, the fruit of a collaboration between the Fordham University Center for Jewish Studies, the Primo Levi Center, and the Fordham Center on Religious and Culture, is the first of its kind in New York City. It will gather Aviv’s long-time fans, newcomers to her work, and lovers of language from all backgrounds to celebrate through images and words this exceptional director as she turns 80.