16mm of Innocence (Matador 2015)
What do we really know about our parents? How clearly do we actually remember our childhood?
When a storm blows down an old camelthorn tree in the desert garden of the former Adermann family home in Luderitz, a bleak town along the Skeleton Coast of South West Africa, a chain of events is released that brings together an estranged and dysfunctional family with shocking consequences. Beneath the camelthorn roots lies a human skeleton.
Mother suffers a stroke and dies, forcing the reluctant siblings to congregate from as far away as New York, Hong Kong and Durham, with inevitable confrontation. But it is the discovery of old home movies on grainy 16mm film that unleashes a roller coaster of family history that does not fit with their childhood memories.
Why did Father choose to leave Hamburg and settle in Luderitz in 1945, without ever returning? What is behind the siblings' bitter estrangement? What is the identity of the skeleton and could it be - a family member?
The investigating policeman is an old family friend - and he has revelations of his own.
Children begin by loving their parents; after a time they judge them;
rarely, if ever, do they forgive them (Oscar Wilde)
Inspiration for writing 16mm of Innocence
I was always fascinated by the story my mother told me about her aunt, my grandmother's sister, who died tragically in 1934. She was intelligent, beautiful, and had recently graduated from university. She met a young man and they fell in love. But her father - my great grandfather - by all accounts an unrelenting and formidable French-born attorney, forbade their relationship because the man was a Jew. This broke her heart and the two of them died in an apparent suicide pact when she was only 25 years old: a pain my grandmother bore though she seldom spoke of it, and something I learned of only through finding small newspaper cuttings and questioning my mother.
This piece of family tragedy acted as the catalyst for 16mm of Innocence and the desolate and unforgiving setting of Luderitz along the bleak and fog-bound Skeleton Coast of South West Africa (now Namibia) provided the perfect location. And the rest, as they say is history, and a lot of it! Research. Research into Luderitz's past, its German colonial origins and its dark past provided more than enough material to stitch together a tale of a family torn apart by intolerance and secrets. Forced together in their former home town by the death of their mother (after the discovery of a skeleton in their garden) the estranged siblings come face to face with their past as they watch old 16mm home movies and realise that the past is not quite as they remember it.
As a child of the '60s I grew up with cine film and home movies, splicing and editing, watching films projected on to a sheet on Saturday nights. The endearing magic and yet relatively secretive inaccessibility of film constitutes a cornerstone behind the hidden and forgotten secrets in the family.
What do we really know about our parents? How clearly do we actually remember our childhood?
When a storm blows down an old camelthorn tree in the desert garden of the former Adermann family home in Luderitz, a bleak town along the Skeleton Coast of South West Africa, a chain of events is released that brings together an estranged and dysfunctional family with shocking consequences. Beneath the camelthorn roots lies a human skeleton.
Mother suffers a stroke and dies, forcing the reluctant siblings to congregate from as far away as New York, Hong Kong and Durham, with inevitable confrontation. But it is the discovery of old home movies on grainy 16mm film that unleashes a roller coaster of family history that does not fit with their childhood memories.
Why did Father choose to leave Hamburg and settle in Luderitz in 1945, without ever returning? What is behind the siblings' bitter estrangement? What is the identity of the skeleton and could it be - a family member?
The investigating policeman is an old family friend - and he has revelations of his own.
Children begin by loving their parents; after a time they judge them;
rarely, if ever, do they forgive them (Oscar Wilde)
Inspiration for writing 16mm of Innocence
I was always fascinated by the story my mother told me about her aunt, my grandmother's sister, who died tragically in 1934. She was intelligent, beautiful, and had recently graduated from university. She met a young man and they fell in love. But her father - my great grandfather - by all accounts an unrelenting and formidable French-born attorney, forbade their relationship because the man was a Jew. This broke her heart and the two of them died in an apparent suicide pact when she was only 25 years old: a pain my grandmother bore though she seldom spoke of it, and something I learned of only through finding small newspaper cuttings and questioning my mother.
This piece of family tragedy acted as the catalyst for 16mm of Innocence and the desolate and unforgiving setting of Luderitz along the bleak and fog-bound Skeleton Coast of South West Africa (now Namibia) provided the perfect location. And the rest, as they say is history, and a lot of it! Research. Research into Luderitz's past, its German colonial origins and its dark past provided more than enough material to stitch together a tale of a family torn apart by intolerance and secrets. Forced together in their former home town by the death of their mother (after the discovery of a skeleton in their garden) the estranged siblings come face to face with their past as they watch old 16mm home movies and realise that the past is not quite as they remember it.
As a child of the '60s I grew up with cine film and home movies, splicing and editing, watching films projected on to a sheet on Saturday nights. The endearing magic and yet relatively secretive inaccessibility of film constitutes a cornerstone behind the hidden and forgotten secrets in the family.
