The Last Letter/Zyklon Portrait and the Walnut Tree
In "The Last Letter" it is 1941; a Russian Jewish woman living in a Ukrainian city seized by the Germans writes her son a final letter. She knows that all the Jews will be killed within days. In this last letter she shows her courage, dignity, fear and fierce love of her son as she reviews her life and faces her death.
"Zyklon Portrait," a short film poem, is a Holocaust film without Holocaust imagery; instead, family photographs, underwater photography and hand-painted images draw a personal elegy out of historical minutiae in a deceptively powerful meditation on Zyklon B, the chemical compound used by the Nazis as a genocidal weapon. Through a striking combination of documentary and experimental approaches, "The Walnut Tree" is an eloquent meditation on survival, examining Holocaust memory, the family and the role of photography in history.
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