(2004) – 60 minutes/
Original Format: 35mm, S-16 & Super-8mm film, DV cam, Hi-8 video, VHS, and digital scans
My 7-year-old son (who was born with a slightly malformed hand) came
and asked me a question the other day: “Does strange sex produce
strange babies?” Then he turned to his German grandfather (a Holocaust
survivor) and asked him: “Where was our Savior during the Holocaust?”
We looked at him and didn’t know what to say.... Then he began to tell
us his story about the Holy Freak.
This is a 'documentary collage' about what a child learns about love in
the house of a Holocaust survivor and the bizarre savior myth he
creates for comfort. Later, he makes an eccentric, personal travelogue
of his return to the country which killed his family and his struggle
to understand what love really can and can't do
(This excerpt is the entire 60 min. film in 30 seconds)
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Director's Comment
Everyone has to have something to believe in, in order to go on. If
someone in your family survived the Holocaust, what would you believe
in as a child? God? Love? Your family? What if your family made you
feel like a freak? As a child you would just make up a wild story to
explain everything.
I never know where a film will lead me as I make it, but it gives me
something to hold on to and a way to go forward. I ask myself and
others real questions about lov~ death, healing, memory, and faith. I
may not find answers, but out of the questioning I make thousands of
pictures that are collaged into a sort of spiritual horror film.
he film weaves together a number of threads. One is the idea that
the freak or monster, the crippled or deformed is closer to God because
of their burden. I am interested in the experience of rejection and
acceptance, whether among groups, within families, or within oneself.
When we are attracted to someone, what are we really attracted to? Why
do we grow up thinking love will save us and change our lives like a
savior?
he film presents memory as a form of reincarnation and emotional
growth as type of death and rebirth. Another thread is the exploration
of the healing process that takes place after a personal or cultural
trauma. Post-war Second generation Jews and Germans have constructed
various myths in their attempts to explain, confront, forgive or deny
the past. I am interested in how these myths transform or die over
time. I am particularly fascinated by the emotional impact of images
and how religions, war propaganda, pop culture and films all use them
to leave a vivid afterimage in the mind's eye.
The narrative collage style I have developed draws from the way
survivors and disturbed people tell stories - fractured, searching for
order or understanding. Hundreds of details, memories, and connections
are all seen at once, flowing like a dream. Sometimes it feels like
experiencing two people's points of view at the same time, sometimes
like a swirl of emotions that we can't describe. Keeping the audience's
senses hyperactive through dissolving layers of picture, music, story,
and editing, I hope to overwhelm the logical mind and stimulate an
emotional experience.
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