Cape Town-based filmmaker Madeleine Bazil is releasing Grandpa Ernest Speaks – a short documentary she wrote and directed.
The film will be released online tomorrow, 13 October, on the platform, Girls in Film. It will also make a German premiere this week as an official selection in the 2022 Refugees Welcome Film Festival, hosted at Berlin’s historic Babylon Cinema.
Grandpa Ernest Speaks is a personal story, centring around Bazil’s own great-grandfather Ernest and his experience of escaping from Nazi-occupied Prague as a Jewish refugee during the Holocaust.
It has been described as “a unique balance of gentleness with strength and determination” as well as “a nuanced poetic presentation of… an intensely subjective experience.”
The film was the production for Bazil’s master’s thesis at UCT’s Centre for Film and Media Studies. It premiered in South Africa this winter, in the Encounters South African International Documentary Film Festival. It has since screened internationally across Europe in Czechia, Greece, Poland, Portugal, and Romania.
Bazil is 27 years old and is an American artist based in South Africa. She has had both visual and written work exhibited and published in SA, the UK and Europe, and the United States.
Grandpa Ernest Speaks follows Bazil on a three year journey as she collects audio memoirs, family photographs, footage and testimonies charting her family’s story.
“I have long felt that my great-grandfather’s story deserves to be shared,” Bazil explains. “But I was specifically motivated to tell my family’s story in a way that engages with the ripple effects of trauma; the intergenerational transfer of memory; the ways we construct and negotiate definitions of identity, home, and belonging—and the way these things may be self-determined or foisted upon us. These are conversations I rarely see reflected/represented onscreen in the way I’ve experienced them.”
The streaming platform Girls in Film (GIF) is based in London and represents women, non-binary and trans creatives of the new generation in the film industry. Bazil explains that releasing the film online with GIF was a “natural choice”.
Bazil adds that it was incredibly meaningful for her to bring the film to the Refugees Welcome Festival, an event that amplifies refugee stories, experiences and feelings.
Grandpa Ernest Speaks will be screenable online from tomorrow, 13 October, at girlsinfilm.com.
For more information click here.
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Picture: Film Freeway
