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"Birobidzhan Atlas" is a film exploring Jewish Autonomous Region, an area that is located in the Far East of the Russian Federation. Founded by the Soviet government in 1934, the Jewish Autonomous Region became an official self-determined Jewish entity long before the establishment of the State of Israel. The landscape had a harsh geography and climate: it was mountainous, covered with virgin forests of oak, pine and cedar, and also swamplands festering with mosquitoes, and any new settlers would have to build their lives from scratch in this underpopulated region on the border of contested Manchuria. Birobidzhan is a town and the administrative center of the Jewish Autonomous Region, Russia, located on the Trans-Siberian Railway, close to the border with China. It is named after the two rivers: the Bira and the Bidzhan, which are tributaries of the Amur. The city was planned by the second director of Bauhaus, Swiss architect Hannes Meyer, and established in 1931. Birobidzhan Atlas employs Aby Warburg’s method of “ montage-collision ”, to build a representation of the area through combination of historical archives and documentation of today’s landscape, the relationship between the utopian and the represented landscape.

Anton Ginzburg (b. 1974, St. Petersburg, Russia) is a New York-based artist and filmmaker, investigating historical narratives and poetic studies of place, representation, and post-Soviet identity. He earned a BFA from The New School for Social Research and MFA degree from Bard College, Milton Avery Graduate School of Arts, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. His work has been shown at the 54th Venice Biennale, the Blaffer Art Museum at the University of Houston, Southern Alberta Art Gallery in Canada, Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, White Columns in New York, Lille 3000 in Euralille, France, and the first and second Moscow Biennales. His films have been screened at the Whitechapel Gallery in London, Rotterdam International Film Festival (IFFR), Dallas Symphony Orchestra, Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, Les Rencontres Internationales in Paris, Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin and New York Film Festival/Projections among others.