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ART, WOMEN AND MEMORY
Program
Three filmmakers come together to explore film as a means of personal storytelling and art as a way of preserving and transmitting memory. Do filmmakers or women have special roles and responsibilities as keepers and conveyers of memory?
THROUGH THE EYE OF THE NEEDLE -
THE ART OF ESTHER NISENTHAL KRINITZ
USA, 2011, documentary
30 minutes
English
Director: Nina Shapiro-Perl
World Premiere |
AND DON'T MISS THE EXHIBIT:
“Fabric of Survival”
Smithsonian Institution
Ripley Center Third Floor Concourse
1100 Jefferson Drive, SW, Washington, DC
Hours: 10 a.m. – 5:30 p.m. daily / Admission is FREE
November 11, 2011-January 29, 2012 |
As an older woman, Esther was determined to share childhood memories of family, loss and Holocaust survival in Poland with her children and grandchildren. But it is the way she told her story—through 36 panels of fabric collage and embroidery—that makes it all the more extraordinary. Through images of her artwork, Esther’s own words from before her death and interviews with her daughters and others, the film (Work-in-Progress, WJFF 2009) explores the toll of suffering and the capacity of the human heart to heal.
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LETTERS HOME
USA, 2010, experimental short
9 minutes
English
Director: Melissa Hacker
Mid-Atlantic Premiere
Freda left her home in Austria in 1925 to start a new life in America. As a member of the American Army’s Women’s Army Corps, she traveled through Europe after WWII, returning to Germany and Austria. Hacker (My Knees Were Jumping: Remembering the Kindertransports) uses her great-aunt’s letters to her family in New York during that journey as well as faded and discolored archival film to portray the search for what no longer exists and the fragility of memories.
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YIZKOR
USA, 2010, short
23 minutes
English
Director: Ruth Fertig
DC Premiere
Gold Medal, 2010 Student Academy Awards
Ruth’s grandmother never talked about the Holocaust. But after her death, the filmmaker discovers her grandmother’s memoir. Using animation, home movies, historic footage and super8 film, Fertig lovingly breathes life into her grandmother’s story of survival, resignation and resilience.
POST-FILM DISCUSSION WITH filmmakers Nina Shapiro Perl, Melissa Hacker and Ruth Fertig; moderated by memoirist Faye Moskowitz
CO-SPONSORED BY Women in Film and Video-DC, Generation After, Child Survivors of the Holocaust and Baltimore-Washington Child Survivors of the Holocaust
PRESENTED IN PARTNERSHIP WITH the DCJCC's Ann Loeb Bronfman Gallery
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