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Feature documentary film

December 1941. A group of women and a 10-year-old girl named Sorella are photographed as they are ordered to take their clothes off in freezing temperatures. 80 years later, filmmaker Peter Hegedüs creates a dramatic recreation based on the photograph using new immersive 360 technology. He is aided by Ethel Davis, a 92-year-old Jewish Australian whose family perished in the 1941 massacre and by the powerful testimonial of his own Jewish grandmother who managed to survive the Holocaust. To Never Forget goes beyond the depiction of a filmmaker’s process, revealing how the Holocaust continues to affect lives, families and geopolitics today.

Background

TO NEVER FORGET is an 82-minute documentary, made in the tradition of Holocaust testimony in screen culture with documentaries such as Resnais’ Night and Fog (1956), Lanzmann's Shoah (1985) and The Last Days (1998).

In the midst of extreme right-wing movements, this documentary uncovers an atrocity photograph from 1941 depicting a group of women and a 10-year-old girl before their execution. They are among 3640 Latvian Jewish women and children massacred by Nazi troops and collaborators. Peter Hegedus created an immersive experience out of the photograph through a dramatised VR360 film. Peter uncovers the story of his own Jewish grandmother who survived the Nazi Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. To Never Forget investigates the extent to which the Holocaust continues to affect lives, families and geopolitics.

Contribution

The documentary adopts an investigative approach with a personal narrative to offer perspectives on the Holocaust for younger audiences. An innovation that helps target young people is embedding black and white drawings to show the complex documentary narrative.

As a child, the filmmaker’s grandmother shared stories about her time in the Nazi Concentration Camp, so the filmmaker’s imagining of the Holocaust had been rooted in this visual world. The drawings in the film reveal the horrors of the Holocaust in a way building on a tradition of artists who after World War II, took to comics to express views of the Holocaust best evidenced in the MAUS (1987) by Art Spiegelman.

Significance

The film had its premiere at the Brisbane International Film Festival with two screenings at the Powerhouse and at Dendy Cinemas. It was received positively by audiences with the Q&A hosted by journalist Peter Greste. The film has been one of the highlights of the International Jewish Film Festival (JIFF) that attracts 1000s of people, with the film shown in every major Australian city over three weeks. The film received a nomination for the Best Feature Documentary Award at the 2024 Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts Awards (AACTA Awards).