FROM THE DIRECTOR
In the beginning I wanted to make a film about the dead Nazis in my mother’s family.
The reason was simple and unbearable: that homely state of depression. Glorious family legends of goodness and righteousness correlated just vaguely with the corroding relations I had with my mother and grandmother. What had I missed? A lot, it seemed: my first home, my father, the family on his side, my grandfathers, one of whom was the hunter, who always felt as if just around the corner. Even though he had been dead many years, we were still kind of waiting for him.
260 hours of footage and a few years later, what we needed to achieve in the montage was a notion of nil-to-hold-on-to. We are dealing with nothing less than fascism here and some of its extended ways of continuously death-gripping people. It was our aim to cut off every handle on the film, thus leaving the audience filling in their own emotions, relations and stories at every moment of the film. Everyone has parents and a family history. And almost every family is distorted by historical events, dead forebears, past lives. The epic home movie is the most consequential form we could come up with. Using all the footage from the present as if it was historical footage was an important choice.
Editing the film became an overwhelming mourning experience in itself, which could only get finished through the brilliant collaboration and support of the good people surrounding this project. Everything is still fresh today, but for the first time bearable. How am I? Sometimes still angry, sometimes still sad. But there seems a life ahead... and something completely different in the works.
MJC.
