Swedish documentary filmmaker Magnus Gertten apparently has a very unusual hobby. Of course it’s not an everyday hobby, in fact it’s not even a hobby, but perhaps more of an obsession, a life mission, which is the search for the identities and names of the women on the recordings from May 1945, which show the survivors of the Nazi concentration camps. Gertten has been studying the footage of thousands of tortured women arriving in Swedish Malmö after who knows how many years in Malthausen, Ravensbrück and similar Nazi camps. And he has already made several films in which he found out who these women were through those recordings and then tried to reconstruct their lives and find out who they were, and now it’s the turn of two new protagonists.
And again it’s an incredible and poignant story, which he found out quite by accident during the Paris premiere of his previous film when a woman named Sylvie Blanchi approached him and told him she knew who one of those women was. And we see that slightly androgynous and masculine, oriental face, which will turn out to be Nadine Hwang, the daughter of the Chinese ambassador to Spain, who was part of the Parisian cultural scene in the thirties. Not only that, Nadine, it turns out, was the lover of Sylvia’s grandmother, the Belgian-born opera singer Nelly, who was later an active member of the French resistance movement, and the two women fell in love in a concentration camp.
It will turn out that Sylvie also has a huge amount of archival footage of her grandmother, letters and diaries that she didn’t have the courage to open earlier in her life, and with the help of all these documents, Gertten and that woman will start a search and try to reconstruct the lives of Nelly and Nadine. This documentary was equally poetic and poignant, sad and wonderful putting together the mosaic of the lives of two people who were brought together by fate in probably the most terrible place possible, in a Nazi camp. Watching this and numerous other films that deal with that probably the most terrible episode in human history, one has to imagine how many lives were cut short and destinies shaped during those terrible years.
How would all these lives have unraveled in the first place and what would it look like if a certain guy from Austria had once been admitted to the art academy and what would the world look like today if all these horrors had not happened. And while Gertten in one of his previous films came to the conclusion that after 1945 and her liberation from the camp, Nadine went to China, now he has made incredible discoveries. We will see how these two women managed to find each other even after the end of the war and that they lived together for the next twenty years, and they kept a diary together all those years. What is best of all, a few years after the end of the war, they had the desire to publish their joint story, but none of the publishers was particularly interested, so they soon sank into oblivion. Until a Swedish documentary filmmaker pulled them out of it and made a film premiered in Berlin.