Cinéma Invisible - Babel, je moet alles weten

The Russian writer Isaac Babel became famous with his series of short stories Red Cavalry (1920). He could write this account of the Polish-Russian war from 1920 so poignantly because he had been there. This urge to know what really happened characterised his life. So, he also knew that in the days of the great terror in the Soviet Union, the thirties, that his life was in immediate danger. What did he want to say with the last work he completed, the screenplay Oude Plein 4, the address of the Communist Party Central Committee, before he was arrested and murdered? And who was this man, who decided to stay in Russia in spite of everything, even when his wife, mother and younger sister all went to the West? Why did he somehow want to stay faithful to the core of what used to be the revolution, while he rarely and only in the beginning could realise what he had in mind? Not surprisingly, later, when Babel has long been victimised, his daughter wonders: 'Was this man stupid?'