Jewish Film Festival Berlin-Brandenburg: Family talks about survival
Jewish Film Festival Berlin-Brandenburg
–
Family talks about survival
Mon 13.06.22 | 5:03 p.m. | Of
For almost 30 years, the Jewish Film Festival Berlin-Brandenburg has been offering accurate and moving insights into what constitutes Jewish life today. One focus this year: family stories that are not just about the Shoah. By Kirsten Dietrich
The Holocaust is featured in the program of this edition of the Berlin-Brandenburg Jewish Film Festival (June 14 to 19) as rarely in recent years. Perhaps driven by the knowledge that these are the last years for the survivors can tell their stories. But surviving, as this year’s program makes particularly clear, has consequences far beyond the Nazi era.
Finally arguing again with the found sister
The documentary “Adam & Ida” tells the story of the twin siblings of the same name: They were separated as small children. The mother committed suicide, an older sister remained missing. Ida and Adam survived National Socialism, both with Polish families. Her survival story also tells of how complex a term like “rescue” is. Or as the subtitle of the film suggests: “Almost a fairy tale” – just a fairy tale.
Ida came into a loving family, but later had to struggle to regain her identity as a Jew. Adam, on the other hand, always knew that he was Jewish, but searches in vain for family warmth. When the two found each other again after a long search in the mid-1990s, it was salvation – but not the healing of all wounds. The siblings wrestle with the past – and they argue, as siblings do. Even though he lives with her in the USA today, Adam actually stayed in Poland, Ida complains. For ten years his sister was an angel to him, then she became a sister, counters Adam.
The house as the only safe place in the world
What is it like living with mothers who survived the Holocaust? Two impressive films show how difficult this can be. In “Housewitz” the Dutch documentary filmmaker Oeke Hoogendijk approaches her mother’s life with her camera. Her mother Lous never leaves the house. Lous explains very frankly that she is claustrophobic, everything outside of the house and bed is unsafe.
As a teenager, she survived the Theresienstadt and Westerborg concentration camps. As an adult, she fears nothing more than losing control of her life all over again. Everything is secondary to this search for stability: mother and daughter recall a time when the daughter was seriously ill in the hospital for six weeks – even then the mother could not leave her house. Only the father came to visit and brought pumped breast milk.
A film that revolves around an old woman and never moves far from the house: Oeke Hoogendijk has made a moving portrait of this situation. The director lovingly portrays her mother as an independent woman with a black-humoured quick-wittedness. But this autonomy is hard won.
“I don’t want to be a survivor, I want to live”
“Evolution” by the Hungarian directors Kornél Mundruczó and Kata Wéber approaches the differently experienced trauma through the generations with the means of the feature film. While cleaning a barracks in Auschwitz-Birkenau, soldiers find a baby: Eva. Eva is saved – but she passes her trauma on to her daughter Lena. “I don’t want to be a survivor, I want to live,” she reproaches her mother decades later. You deserve to have it easier in life. But the mother refuses this wish, out of a mixture of a lifelong experience of anti-Semitism and the onset of dementia.
The film is designed as a triptych: three parts show three generations struggling with each other and with themselves. In the last part, grandson Jonas will simply belong in present-day Berlin. As a Jew, he is bullied at school, an overwhelmed teacher wants the face of the school to be true, his mother cannot be of any real help to him. After all, Jonas is young and lives in quieter times. So maybe a tender first love is the beginning of something new.
The Dark Side of the Patriarch
Another complex family story is told in the documentary “Blue Box” by the famous director by Michal Weits. The conflict between the generations is not about the Holocaust, but about the emergence of the State of Israel. Joseph Weits, the director’s great-grandfather, organized key early land purchases prior to the founding of the state in 1948 and reforestation programs thereafter. But he also supported the expulsion of the Arab rural population after the war of independence.
Hills with villages turned into forests with ruins. Trees, actually a symbol of life, now stand guard like soldiers, as Michal Weits says. She confronts her father and her uncles and cousins with the question of whether a new way of dealing with the revered founding father is necessary. Yes, says the younger generation. You can’t really judge that from today, die older.
The Jewish Film Festival [jfbb.info] runs from 14.-19. June. Unlike the previous two years, this year’s films cannot be viewed online. The festival organizers focus entirely on the cinema, the films are shown in Berlin and Potsdam.
Broadcast: rbb24 Brandenburg aktuell, June 14, 2022, 7:30 p.m