Film Description--Maelstrom – A Family Chronicle

LINK TO 2003 SEATTLE JEWISH FILM FESTIVAL!

or the AJC Home page:WWW.AJCSEATTLE.ORG

March 10 - 18, 2001

Film Description

West Coast Premiere
Netherlands, 1998
60 min, video
Peter Forgacs, Director

Sunday, March 18, 3:00 pm

Special Guests: Filmmaker Peter Forgacs; Miriam Greenbaum, Executive Director of Washington State Holocaust Education Resource Center and Joanne Rudof, Director Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, Yale University.

Maelstrom – A Family Chronicle

A pioneer in the use of “found footage,” the brilliant Hungarian director Peter Forgacs chronicles the lives of the Dutch Jewish Peereboom family during the period 1933 to 1942, using the family’s own home movies, along with segments filmed by the family of the Nazi governor of Holland. The irony created by the juxtaposition of the two families, and our knowledge of subsequent events, turn these innocent images of the Peereboom family--at the beach, getting married, having children, growing up--into something particularly bitter-sweet. Our feeling of helplessness grows into a suppressed scream as the final images appear on screen: this nice Jewish family is preparing clothes for the journey to the "labor camps" in Germany.