Three films for Our Story, Yad Vashem’s project of twelve short films by six filmmakers, made while the survivors who gave the testimonies were still alive to see them.
In 2020, just before the country closed, Yad Vashem asked six filmmakers to make twelve short films from the testimonies of survivors who were living. The brief carried a constraint that shapes everything: the films were for a whole family to watch together, which meant they could not be built out of atrocity.
One of the most common responses to a survivor’s testimony is an inability to take in the scale of the cruelty. So we looked instead for the human points inside each account — the moments that show who this person was, what they were like, how they thought — and built each film around those. Not because the rest is not there, but because a viewer who cannot hold the whole will still hold a child standing on a stone.
Two of the three people in these films, Elka and Saul, have since died. The films were shown at Zikaron BaSalon and elsewhere.
An orphan, a death march, and the German nurse who took her in.
A brother struck from a list, and fourteen years before the news.
The girl who answered back, and the name it earned her.