Separations

2009 | 84mins | Colour
Directed by Mieke Bal & Andrea Seligmann Silva

Genre: Documentary
Portuguese and Dutch with English subtitles

When migration runs in the family, a traumatic history looms.

In this autobiographical film, a diasporic Brazilian family is reunited in São Paulo.

All five siblings, at one time or another, have established themselves abroad. While exploring the reasons behind this connection to the foreign in her family, Andréa, a filmmaker living in Amsterdam, interviews the members of her family. They all evoke a psychotic crisis their mother had five years ago. So Andréa begins to focus her inquiry on what took place then, as well as on the traumatic events of a generation ago.

Edith, Andréa’s Jewish mother, was three years old when her parents escaped from Nazi Germany in 1939. The question of the migratory now turns both backwards and forwards, and danger becomes as potent a motive as the attraction to foreign places.

Separations has been selected for several international film festivals, including:

• the Bright Future program of the International Film Festival Rotterdam 2010.
• Belo Horizonte International Film Festival, Belo Horizonte, Brazil, October 24, 2010
• Outubro Indepente Festival, São Paulo, Brazil, October 12, 2010
• Warsaw Film Festival, Warsaw, Poland, 8 – 11 October, 2010
• “Whose Global Humanities.” 2010 annual CHCI meeting, the Cogut Center for the Humanities, Brown University, Providence, RI, US, 15 June, 2010
• International Women’s Film Festival, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 9 – 10 June 2010
• “It’s All True”: International Documentary Film Festival, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 9 – 18 April, 2010

All contents © 2011, Mieke Bal | Site design it’s a lab