It Comes a Long Way
There are many ways that the past returns. The challenge is probably not how to avoid it, but how to deal with it. "IT COMES A LONG WAY" features two exceptional documentaries in which the past visits the present "on camera." Sarah Vanagt and Katrien Vermeire's THE WAVE is a visual documentation of the disinterment of a mass grave from the Spanish Civil War. In Marcel Łoziński's TONIA AND HER CHILDREN three people recall a woman whose life was heavily scarred by the 20th century.
The Wave
In October 2011, Sarah Vanagt and Katrien Vermeire filmed the gradual disinterment of a mass grave from the Spanish Civil War. Their video document THE WAVE is devoid of pathos and safely circumnavigates any forms of spectacle. In at least two senses it is a document of time: THE WAVE not only visualizes the process of digging, the surfacing and gradual visibility of the remains of the victims and the final resealing of the site; by alternating fast motion sequences and static panoramas, the video also reflects on its own conditions of time and the temporality of the observation as such. How can the cinematic gesture become a document? How can a 20-minute video reflect on the dizzying discrepancy between 70 years of concealment and the short period of visibility additionally condensed by the camera? Sarah Vanagt and Katrien Vermeire have obviously tried to address questions of this kind and the answers they have come up with express great integrity.
- Belgien
- 20:00 Min.
- Director: Sarah Vanagt, Katrien Vermeire
- Year: 2012
Tonia and her Children
Tonia Lechtman was a Polish Jew who had passionately supported communism since her teenage years and who was persecuted, imprisoned and tortured by the various regimes she lived under. Her Austrian husband joined the international brigades in the Spanish Civil War, for which he was later imprisoned in France and then murdered in Auschwitz. Tonia and her two children survived World War II in France and with the help of a US officer managed to get back to Poland. There, however, Tonia was again imprisoned, this time as an alleged American spy, and repeatedly tortured. While her children, Werka and Marcel, grew up in state institutions where they experienced discrimination, Tonia spent almost six years in an isolation cell. When anti-Semitism grew strong again in Poland during the 1960's, Tonia finally emigrated to Israel in 1968, where once again she had to face discrimination because of her communist past. Werka went with her, while Marcel emigrated to Sweden. Now the two siblings are seated at a table, joined by filmmaker Marcel Łoziński, and the camera is recording. On the table are the interrogation minutes from the Polish archives in which Tonia is made to say things no one would want to say. Marcel reads, the others listen. For Werka the files are not news, but the repressed past breaks like a tidal wave over her brother.
- Polen
- 57:00 Min.
- Director: Marcel Łoziński
- Languages: polnisch
- Subtitles: englische
- Year: 2011