HISTORY - SHOAH

Esterke

Oy Esterke, Esterke
Alik Romm — The Monodrama Theater

— Performed at Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem.

Brochure

This is Ephraim Romm’s story, a Holocaust survivor, for whom "walking forward is to go back to your childhood" – from childhood to old age and back. Ephraim Romm’s childhood was one of war, Ghetto, hard work, and hiding. And, then, a courageous escape that got him out of the clutches of the Nazis and into a search for his family or whatever was left of it. Finally, there was freedom. What freedom? Is it ever possible to leave behind what he has been through and find real freedom?
This is the story of a fifteen year old boy who started the war in the summer between grade nine and grade ten and ended it at the age of nineteen, deeply scarred by the events of the war.
The story is accompanied by the vision of Esterke, Ephraim’s niece, a five year old girl with brown curls, a cheerful laughter, dimples, and a bit of hope. Also interweaved in the story are other members of Ephraim’s family who accompanied his journey during the war but did not survive it, leaving him at the end, all alone.
Ephraim kept his story to himself throughout most of his life and decided to write it down and share it with the interviewers at Yad Va Shem (the Holocaust Memorial Center in Jerusalem) shortly before his death. After his death in 11.11.2011, his son, Alik Romm, wrote the script for this monodrama and is playing his father’s impossible and incomprehensible journey. The play was directed by Yael Ambar.

POLITICS

Bonjour les enfants

Bonjour les enfants welcomes new generation of teen-agers who live in Israel. “Aurevoir les enfants” by Louis Malle inspired in me a sense of continuity despite historical events and the sadness of the Shoah. As a consequence of that Aurevoir became Bonjour!

Those guys have just received what in Israel is considered entrance to the adult world such as army call-up.

Bonjour les Enfants was born from my relationship with Israeli left-wingers. I needed to tell the truth about teen-agers who live in Israel who are extremely involved in politics and want to contribute to the future of their country. They are convinced the coutry can survive only by taking Palestine into consideration.
Andrée

— Shown at Omanut, Israel 1906 - 2006 October 2006 - January 2007 Royal Palace, Milan, Italy.

SOCIETY

Montessori Project

written and directed by
Andrée Ania Rossi M.
with Anna Encarnacao / Profile

music by Jared C. Balogh
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/

As a documentary film maker and as a entrepreneur who is aimed to start Montessori laboratories connected to moving images studies, I have been exploring Montessori Schools environment for four years all over the western world. I have been in many countries and I had the opportunity of observing for long periods dynamics in the schools. That was amazingly interesting.

Although parents many time choose Montessori schools, I have discovered that they need to know more about that method. That’s why, when I met Anna Encarnacao who I immediately recognized and felt as a person who really understood Montessori’s thought, I proposed to her of doing and audio video documentary about that.

Each audio documentary episode goes into-depth with a topic which we consider essential not only for parents but also for society in order to better understand Montessori approach.

SOCIETY

Learning about Syryngomyelia and Chiari malformations

My audio and video documentaries about AISMAC - Italian Syryngomyelia and Chiari Association - are aimed to convey how founders realized such a reality of support was vital in Italy. A reality which gives comfort and assistance to patients from the moment of diagnosis onward. read more

HISTORY - SHOAH

Destination Auschwitz

Destination Auschwitz is a documentary produced in partnership with the CDEC - Centro di Documentazione Ebraica Contemporanea of Milan, Italy which is the most important European film library regarding the Shoah. Historians, film-makers and computer programmers have been working for four years on the project of Destination Auschwitz. The project itself has been awarded the Innovation Prize by the European Union and is now published by Proedi Editore. With the production of the present film, the project of Destination Auschwitz has been completed. In order to portray the Shoah Lilitwork has been using different sources. Sources taken from the Museum of Auschwitz Birkenau and from the Museum Yad Vashem of Jerusalem. Numerous photographs of the time show the reality and brutality of the deportation and stermination. Contemporary three-dimensional reconstructions enabled us to fully portray that crucial moment in history.

Scenes from the most representative movies and documentary films on the subject have been used by Lilithwork in order to present the reality of Shoah.

— Broadcasted on RAI EDUCATIONAL January, the 27th 2003
— Memoria, Exhibition at Palazzo della Ragione, Milano, 2005.
— Memoria, Exhibition at Palazzo della Ragione, Milano, 2004.
— Pitifest 2003, Jewish Cultural Festival, Pitigliano, Tuscany.
— Palazzo dei Principi, Correggio Conferenza di presentazione “Per non dimenticare”.
— Torino Film festival 2002.
— Enclosed with the national paper Rizzoli Corriere della Sera.
— Broadcasted on RAI EDUCATIONAL January, the 27th 2003.
— Homepage of Corriere dalla Sera January, the 27th 2003.
— Palazzo Reale, Milano – Exhibition Memoria, I sommersi e i salvati.
— Published by editrice Giuntina, Firenze

HISTORY - SHOAH

Conversation with Goti Bauer

Goti Bauer - born Agata Herskovitz - was born on the 29th of July 1924 in Berehovo, which at the time was Hungary. She moved to Fiume, Italy at the time. Goti has left many parents in Hungary. She visits her sister every summer.

She is 14 years old in 1938, when Italian Racial Laws are promulgated. And Goti is nearly 20 when she is betrayed and arrested with her father Luigi, her mother Rebecca and her brother Tiberio fleeing from Italy on the swiss border.

Goti experienced imprisonment in Varese, Como, Milan. Then from Fossoli transit Camp she is deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau Extermination Camp with her family. Selected as a Third Reich slave worker she is transferred from one camp to another. She survived. On the 8th of May 1945 Goti finds herslef in Theresienstadt concentration camp when it was liberated.
After two more months in a Russian concentration camp close to Vienna she eventually goes back to Fiume where she definitely realizes she is the sole survivor in her family. Her moving and rigorous testimony has long been a valuable and inexhaustible source for the Memory of the Shoa

www.figlidellashoah.org

SOCIETY

The keepers of the Usseglio's dams

25 days work shift at the top of the Alps without going back home. Snow and mountains all around them. Snow and dams to be checked all day long.
These are true stories by five dam keepers in Usseglio, Piedmont, Italy. These experiences give value to this land's memories and to its identity.

MIGRATION

La clôture de Sangatte - Closing Sangatte

On December the 18th 2002, after an agreement between Mr Tony Blair and Mr Sarkozy, the Red Cross Centre Refugee Camp known as Sangatte was shut down. This film conveys through sound and images Lilithwork production’s own version of the closure of Sangatte.

The refugee centre of Sangatte, near Calais, was set up by the French Red Cross in 1999 and opened its doors to 75,000 people who fled war and conflict between 1999 and 2002.

— Rome Medfilmfestival 2004. United Nations Festival

— Migrazioni FilmFest, Trento. March 2006.

MIGRATION

Sangatte

Sangatte reports about asylum seekers who flee from war and poverty, people who have been walking from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kurdistan, North Africa for as many as two or three years in order to reach England which is supposed to be the most open European Country for those seeking asylum.

Sangatte is situated close to Calais, in Northern France. This is the last place in Europe before the Channel. Asylum seekers try to jump illegally on the vans to cross the Channel towards England. Many people die doing this.

This film aims to convey what happens in Sangatte without filters. This 30 minutes mute film tries to depict what is going on the story avoiding to patronize or giving a moral of the story. This film tries to let reality to speak for itself.

— Official selection TorinoFilmFestival 2003, documentary category — Selected by Luciano Barisone at AlbaFilmFestival

— Genova 04 Città della Cultura Empowerment Cantiere Italia Museo d'arte contemporanea Villa Croce

— Shown at Lo spirito del Novecento - Orta S.Giulio 2003

HISTORY - SHOAH

I ragazzi ascoltano -
MEINA The First Nazi Massacre of the Jews in Italy

Rebecca Ottolenghi Béhar was 13 when she witnessed and survived the first Nazi massacre of Jewish people in Ialy, on the Lake Maggiore. She left Turkey with her family and they went to Milan and to Lake Maggiore. Unfortunately after Mr. Badoglio announced armistice, the situation in Italy became even worse.

This film shows Rebecca Ottolenghi Béhar telling schoolgirs and schoolboys her story. She explains the stay at the Hotel owned by her family where a group of Jewish people hoped to find shelter. When the rest of the group was killed at the Lake Maggiore, she fled to Switzerland with her family.

Becky Ottolenghi Béhar passed away on the 14th of January 2009 and we are committed to spread her memory by this documentary as if she were with us to give an account of this forgotten massacre.

Students are invited to listen, learn, grow. The historian Mauro Begozzi, of the Istituto Storico della Resistenza in Novara is interviewed by the historian Andrea Bienati and by the journalist Laura De Feudis; in his interview he helps us recall of the deepest collective memories connected to the massacre of Meina.

— Shown at Palazzo della Ragione: exhibition "30 gennaio 1944. Convoglio RSHA. Milano-Auschwitz".

— Casa della Resistenza di Fondotoce, International Holocaust Remembrance Day 2005

— Prize 'Novara per la sua storia e il territorio 2004'. Foundation Banca Popolare Novara

SOCIETY

Alzheimer

Alzheimer disease is a scaring one. Even families of people who become patient are sometimes so scared from that form of dementia that they literarily leave her or him alone. Usually just one or two parents look after one person who became patient. The rest of parents leave because they are scared. One of the reasons of this fear is that patients change their behavior and sometimes they become even aggressive towards people who live with them. They are aggressive because they do not remember they are their parents and they feel as if they were strangers. Parents are also scared because we are talking about a mental problem which sometimes is felt as connected with psychiatric problems and, as a result, emberassing.

Even though a lot has been done, that's what researchers know until now. There is still so much to do in terms of breakthroughs about Alzheimer's disease.

The aim of this film is to investigate new relationship which starts between parents who take care of patient and the sick person. Due to the fact that part of the brain has a strong infection, people who are diagnosed by Alzheimer's disease do not remember their past lives properly. Therefore they have no choice and they have to live new life. Which is not necessarily bad news, someone states.

Filming this situation in a Alzheimer hospital, as a director I can state that, on the one hand it is such a awful thing not to be remembered and recognized by parents. On the other, parents who are in charge of looking after patients and are willing to overcome this tremendous state show me how to cope with this extremely difficult situation exactly starting a new relationship with their mothers, their fathers, their parents who are suffering. I registered this new path and it was moving and amazing.

What makes me glad of this film is the feelings I have experienced. I admire those people who invented a new relationship day by day so much. I just observed them and listened to them.Those people can even have fun together, thanks to the fact that they gave their new life a possibility.

EXPERIMENTAL CINEMA - THEATRE

Phedra's love

My attention was drawn by the sense of responsibility driving the dialogues in Sarah Kane's PHEDRA'S lOVE. I adapted this screenplay in order to give her work tribute. A work inspired by Sarah Kane’s Phaedra’s Love.
Di Fedra is a visual reflection around the Greek myth of Phaedra and an attempt to live its tragic emotions through the means of video-theatre. The film brings the myth to a contemporary audience. Shot in a Visconti castle in Northern Italy, the atmosphere is evocative and invites the audience to reflect on how we relate in a post-modern world. — Andrée

— CWT Creative Web Tv Festival 2001, Triennale di Milano. Selected by film critic Gianni Canova