100 years have passed since she was born in far away Yemen who was to win the honorable title “The Queen of the Hebrew Singer”. Shoshana Demari’s life and character were made up of many contradictions, brave steps, enormous talent and stardust that made thousands and thousands stick to her character and her songs. It was she, the woman who in her life knew how to wear crowns and adopt royal manners, was almost forgotten by heart during her life and after her death. It took more than ten years for her iconic figure to be properly documented and commemorated.
About a year ago, the movie “Queen Shoshana” was released, created by Kobi Farage and Maurice Ben-Mior, in which the story of her life is presented from an angle that we did not really know. At the age of 16, Demari married the cultural figure Shlomo Bushmi and the two had an only daughter, Nava. Shortly after her birth, Shoshana went on an international tour and saw herself as a cultural ambassador of the newly established State of Israel. It became a resounding success and a source of national pride when it conquered the American audience. She filled the biggest halls and socialized with the leading creators of the time, among other things she performed with Daisy Gillespie’s orchestra at the Jazz Festival in Canada and had close friendships with Nina Simone.
Following the film, and almost randomly, an entire album of Shoshana’s songs was born, “Shoshana”, an adaptation of a jazz version created by the musician Chen Levy as a tribute to Demari’s friendly relationship with Simone that was revealed for the first time in the film.
The applause in the world had a difficult personal price in the form of the complex relationship with her daughter and her husband, which also received harsh criticism from the audience. After Shoshana Demari’s death, her daughter Nava also passed away and all of Shoshana’s estate was locked up in a warehouse and forgotten, along with the preservation of her memory. The film accompanies the opening of the estate, and through the letters, objects and memories that emerge from it, opens up to the public the complex personality of Damari.
“During the work on the film, I was also accompanied by an uneasy feeling because we arrived at an unfiltered place, we were exposed to Shoshana’s greatest moments and the most marginal details of her life, especially because there was no one left there,” says director Kobi Faraj. “The family members, the nephews, opened the door for us and today the result of her estate, the result today is very beautiful because they created a large exhibition of it in the Rishon Lezion Museum.”
“But then as creators,” says Faraj, “to be exposed to the estate in its rawest form was a complete surprise and to get to know her up close was quite a privilege. Admittedly, in my house there was an affinity for her character and I even have a family history that was close to her, she plays in the first color film made in Israel , ‘Motherland’, created by my grandmother’s brother – but it’s really not the soundtrack of my youth. You have to remember, when you come to an estate from those years when the world was run by the exchange of letters, all the feelings are recorded and there as a creator you have to create boundaries, remember what we gathered for – to stimulate Identifying but maintaining modesty, that’s the delicate balance in the film.”
The full article will be published tomorrow (Friday) in Motzash magazine of Mekur Rishon