34/23
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Tale
Nelly and Nadine is an incredible love story between two women who fell in love in 1944. Christmas Eve in the Ravensbrück concentration camp. For many years their relationship was kept a secret.. Magnus Gertten’s 2022 documentary Nelly & A classic love story between 2 WWII Nazi concentration camp survivors, Nadine is also a film about filmmaking. Gerten patiently constructs a fragmentary narrative to reflect the anxiety of his central subject. Sylvie Bianchi is the granddaughter of Belgian opera singer Nelly Mousset-Vos, who fell in love with the mysterious Chinese national Nadine Hwang when they met during a rendition of Puccini’s Madame Butterfly.
“Three Minutes: Overtime” #39;
in 1944 Christmas Eve at Ravensbrücke. 'Nelly & Nadine, this farmer’s wife in idyllic Northern France, embarks on a personal journey involving this remarkable couple. It reminds me of another recent movie, 2022. Bianca Stigter’s examination of an old film about a Polish village just before the Holocaust (based on musician Glenn Kurtz’s book Three Minutes in Poland, published in 2014) uses moving images of people. and place as a research tool for examining bite-sized pieces of erased history. 'Nadine & Nelly' begins with the Red Cross Archive of Liberated Women Refugees, 1945.
What is she thinking?
April 28 landing in Malmö, Sweden, Gertten (who has made two other films about women featured in these photos, Harbor of Hope (2021) and Every Face Has a Name (2015)) lets the camera pan over Nadine Hwang’s intriguingly long gaze. How did she get here? And off we went…It’s fair to say the road has been bumpy. Sylvie’s grandmother left a mysterious Pandora’s box of documents. Delivering 'pieces' story, the film raises as many questions as it answers. Gradually, sometimes a little unhappily, he gets around to answering them, so I finally found out what I wanted to know.
A couple of things worth noting
The story will probably take care of the rest, but for the purposes of this film, Nelly & Nadine' there is a beautiful story that affected me very deeply. Super 8 film reels are very bright, mostly shot by Nadine when the couple lived in Caracas after the war, and add “colors”; and an intimacy that would be difficult to convey in a still photo. There are also powerful prose and poetic poems, entries from Nelly’s diary manuscripts, which the pair worked together after the war to publish (oddly, perhaps, given the nature of their relationship and social taboos). time). Pure horror is Nelly’s account of the couple’s first breakup, “Above, crowning the mountain is a camp, Mauthausen, an antechamber of hell,” describing 5 days and nights of a train journey. gruesome details along with the infamous 186-step ‘Stairway of Death’ carved out of stone where quarry workers were forced to carry huge slabs of stone until they fell.
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There are many other aspects to the film, particularly emphasizing the journey of discovery that Sylvie goes on, but 'Nelly & Nadine' ends well, so worth watching Gertten & Co.” the story of the life of this wonderful couple. British viewers can watch on BBC iPlayer as part of Storyville.