Captured (Q&A with director Arnoud Holleman)

Batya Wolff:
How can I liberate myself from a war that was over before I was born? And can the image archive of my family be of help? These are my central questions in CAPTURED.

My 95-year-old father Max Wolff began photographing immediately after the war to keep the trauma of the Holocaust at a distance. His camera has always had a negative presence in our family, for me and my two sisters. In our immense family archive we have been captured thousands of times, as part of my fathers self-representing narrative.

10 years ago, I switched roles and started filming my father. I wanted to change the dynamics in our family and get a better understanding of his dependency on photography as a coping mechanism. At the same time I delved into the vast family archive to see if I could create a new narrative, in which I could define my own second generation trauma – and do some repair along the way.

Arnoud Holleman:
CAPTURED tells a Jewish (post-war) story and a more universal story, about perception, about dealing with images, which is very topical in our present visual culture. We see two protagonists in their individual and separate struggles to deal with the trauma of the Holocaust. Father Max is fighting memories of real experience, daughter Batya is dealing with an inherited past of death and destruction that she can never live up to. The vast family archive, with thousands of images, is the third protagonist. We witness how images both evoke and block memories at the same time. In the last part of the film, after a series of fruitless confrontations with Max, Batya finds a surprising new way to rewrite her own history, with the help of pre-war archive material.

In connection to the film, the Jewish Museum in Amsterdam hosts an exhibition of the archive, entitles The Kiss of Life. It opens on april 29^th. https://jck.nl/nl/tentoonstelling/kiss-life