Recounting Ilan Flammer’s life is, in a way, a reminder that the word for life in Hebrew, haïm, is in in fact written in the plural ‘lives’ : from foundational activism to the medical caduceus, from the risks Ilan took as an entrepreneur to his devotion as a father, from setting up nursing homes to novel writing and making documentary films, he was always guided by a compass, that of psychoanalysis.
Ilan’s credo was ‘you make your own luck, and you earn your own laziness’. The only sports he indulged in were blackjack at the casino and table tennis at home; he was a defiant child hidden beneath the garments of a mensch—a man of unfailing ethics and steadfast trust.
Ilan’s story began long before his birth with the political awakening of his father Maurice in 1948, the latter left his hometown of Metz to join Israel’s War of Independence. On the Marseille harbour docks, Maurice met his future wife, Tamar and together they boarded the ship that would carry them, in defiance of the British naval blockade meant to stem the tide of Jews, into Mandatory Palestine. They made their home in Tzrifin, and there, on August 22, 1950, Ilan came into the world.
On the eve of his third birthday and most likely on account of his father’s communist beliefs, the family left Israel and returned to settle in Metz. In this industrial city, which since the Middle Ages had been a long-celebrated hub of European Judaism, Ilan grew up spending time between his devout grandparents-who ran their own watchmaker and jewellery shop-and in the local community, where he joined Hashomer Hatzair, the socialist Zionist Jewish youth movement. From his school years in Metz, Ilan remembered learning the violin, but also the indelible pain of anti-Semitism.
Ilan passed his ‘Baccalauréat’ in 1968 and enrolled at the Faculty of Medicine in Nancy, he would then pursue his studies at Tel Aviv University, despite only a mild interest in the profession. After losing consciousness during a dissection session, Ilan decided to specialize in psychiatry, honoring the adage, ‘A psychiatrist is a Jewish doctor afraid of blood.’ His professor in Tel Aviv, Dr. Fried, a left-wing intellectual, would become a guiding figure for him—and it was also thanks to Dr. Fried that he was exempted from military service on medical grounds.
There, the young idealist, who had imagined living in harmony with the Arab population, was outraged by the treatment he received. Ilan joined Matzpen, ‘the compass’ in Hebrew-a small far-left activist group made up of Jews and Arabs advocating for a mixed socialist federation, opposing the occupation policies and the ‘Law of Return,’ which granted Jews economic and fiscal advantages. During a New Year’s celebration in Tel Aviv, Ilan met Yaarit Makowski, an artist, engraver, and painter trained at the Bezalel School of Art in Jerusalem, and who would become the mother of his children.
Ilan and Yaarit settled in Paris after completing their studies in the 1980s, where Ilan formally renounced his Israeli citizenship as a result of his shock and outrage at the war between Israel and Lebanon.
He took up the directorship of the BAPU, the university’s psychological assistance office, and it was there, at the MNEF, that he met Dr. Patrick Devawrin. Together, they embarked on a groundbreaking venture: founding France’s first nursing homes dedicated to Alzheimer’s patients, located in Garches and La Celle-Saint-Cloud, they called them the Villas of Epidaurus.
Along with his work as a psychiatrist, Ilan’s passion for the arts found many expressions—through film production, and artistic patronage.
Ilan became passionate about documentary filmmaking, exploring subjects close to his heart: psychiatry, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and Africa. Throughout his career, he directed seven television documentaries and one feature-length fiction film for the cinema.
His first film, Histoire d’un sort (1986), shot in Cameroon, juxtaposed Western psychiatry with witchcraft. It earned him le Prix des Bibliothèques (The Libraries Prize) at the Festival du Réel and a special mention at the Melbourne Film Festival . In 1992, he directed La mémoire abusée ou les multiples personnalités de Rachel Downing, a critique of the excesses of American psychoanalysis and its frequent diagnoses of Multiple Personality Disorder. A year later, he paid tribute to his brother, the violinist Ami Flammer, in Trois hommes et un trio. In 1994, his film Nazir Younes, arabe de nationalité israélienne explored the challenges of being an Israeli Arab citizen. His opposition to occupation policies continued with Golan, entre guerre et paix (1995), which depicted an Israeli settlement in occupied territory. Saint Louis, Ville d’Afrique offered an immersive experience, following actor Philippe Clévenot as he wandered through the decaying streets of the former colonial city.
Ilan’s momentum was shattered in 1997 by a car accident that claimed his wife’s life. He then drastically changed his way of life, devoting himself entirely to their two young children. It would take him nearly ten years to return to filmmaking with his only feature-length fiction film, inspired by one of his early manuscripts, Le temps d’un regard (2006), it intertwines the fates of two men with that of a woman campaigning for the life of a death row inmate in the United States.
Ilan engaged in numerous cinematic projects as a producer through his production company, Cabiria Films: the series La Bible dévoilée, which offered a reinterpretation of the Bible based on recent archaeological discoveries, and Tanathor, a fiction film by the Israeli Arab director Tawfik Abu Wael. For several years, he developed the script for a feature-length fiction film called L’idéaliste. This unfinished project was an adaptation of his mother’s autobiographical manuscript, recounting the family’s hasty departure to the USSR in 1940 to escape Romanian anti-Semitism driven by the Iron Guard. The family was subsequently deported by Stalin to Uzbekistan, where they endured forced labour camps.
In an effort to define the impulses that moved him and the diversity of his pursuits, Ilan wrote:
« Our street in Metz, the Rue des Jardins, stretched from the Cathedral Square to the street where the synagogues and other Jewish institutions were located. And our house stood at the very heart of it. Perhaps it is from this vantage point that I inherited a taste for existing between two worlds: between Israel and France, between assimilation into the social order and a certain marginality, between art and commerce… »
Ilan Flammer passed away at his Paris home on May 27, 2018, following a battle with leukaemia. He now rests in Montmartre Cemetery beside his beloved wife, Yaarit.
This website, created by his children, Daniel and Mona Flammer, seeks to keep his work alive, offering the public a window into his life and ensuring that his memory lives on.
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