A motion picture about Benjamin Fondane - poet, scholar, human. Birth, family, studies, love, marriage, travels, cultural friendships, theatre, motion picture, war, concentration camp, death. It is but a manifesto against forgetting.

To restructure a human life from disparate fragments is more of an "attempt". Which is why FONDANE ISLAND is an essay, a word that claims its meaning from the French verb essayer- to try. This film is a documentary essay, because it is sourced from documents, but it actually tries to do much more. It endeavors to fill the space between the documents, fill the gap between the information, to give consistency and veracity to a portrait - that of Benjamin Fondane. Benjamin Fondane can be talked about in many ways. He was a poet, scholar, theater and film man. But above all a man "who looked like no other", "a troubled spirit", a modern Ulysses, a wanderer, a philosopher "without a beard" and "with gigolo cravats", a cynic, a historian, a Don Quixote, a naive, "a noble man in a sinister age", an island of humanity in a raging ocean. FONDANE ISLAND aims to reconstruct this complex and contradictory portrait of a man who "had the consciousness of unhappiness", but who knew how to talk about his own existence with refined humor and irony.—Valentin Mocanu