Narrating Amnesia
Eyewitnesses who survived the Second World War won't be around much longer. For the filmmakers in this program that means their grandparents' generation, they can still be interviewed. But: how can you portray the reconstruction of history in images? And what happens when the protagonists don't want to look back at all? When memory falters, when the gaps in the remembered can't be filled? Then we are only left with files, documents, objects. And films such as these, which grab disappearing memories and mark them.
Nurse Gretel #2 - Escape
On the run from Silesia to West Germany - an old woman recalls her experiences towards the end of the Second World War. Her at times highly detailed, at times disjointed story is accompanied by painted-over black and white pictures, pictures that are at times clearly defined, and then at others mere sketches, with blanks, flickering and always in a stream of associations. Pictures that illustrate the narrative and simultaneously translate the fading and reawakening of memory in to a visual experience.
- Deutschland
- 23:15 Min.
- Director: Barbara Hlali
- Languages: deutsch
- Subtitles: englische
- Year: 2012
Places of Memory "Aktion T4": Hilda Slavik
Christoph Kolar's film project is an attempt to document the fate of Hilda Slavik, his grandfather's first wife. Hilda Slavik was murdered in 1940, in the course of the Nazi euthanasia program "Aktion T4". An open secret within the family. A film about the absolute necessity of documenting and the limits of that which can be presented in film.
- Österreich
- 34:20 Min.
- Director: Christoph Kolar
- Languages: deutsch
- Subtitles: englische
- Year: 2011
Spinach & Sugar
"No interviewer would ever approve of that!" the grandmother scolds her granddaughter, the young filmmaker, who is continually confronted, in the attempt to paint a portrait of this remarkable woman and her life, with the limits of the biographically and cinematically possible. Which story should be told, which story is it even possible to tell? For what purpose? And how do you make a film out of it? That's for the generations to work out between themselves.
- Deutschland
- 20:00 Min.
- Director: Laura Laabs
- Languages: deutsch
- Subtitles: englische
- Year: 2011
In War and Revolution
A book from the private library of the Croatian grandparents: "The School in War and Revolution" - written by the grandfather, with a picture of the now 97-year-old grandmother, as a young teacher in the antifascist resistance. A book that, like many others, was removed from libraries and bookstores for ideological reasons in the wake of the political transitions of the 1990s. State-mandated forgetting - what is left to show is the struggle for individual and collective memory.
- Kroatien
- 15:03 Min.
- Director: Ana Bilankov
- Languages: kroatisch
- Subtitles: englische
- Year: 2011