Paper Bridge
( Die Papierene Brücke )

Ruth Beckermann
1987 - 95 min - 16 mm - Couleur - Autriche

"Ruth Beckermann's journey through her own family's history at the same time tells the story of Middle Europe's Jews and of a region. It takes her from Vienna, where her grandmother survived the war by pretending to be dumb (going into the woods to remind herself of the sound of her own voice) and to which her mother returned from Israel, to the landscapes that witnessed the persecution and, against all the odds, the survival of the Jews in Bukovina, once part of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire and now divided between Romania and the USSR. The film is energised by memories and above all by paradoxes : in the Jewish cemetery in Secret an old man is pleasantly surprised at his ability still to cast an images strong enough to register on film ; a Hollywood company filming in a reconstructed Theresienstadt camp recruits Viennese Jews as extras, provided the look "really Jewish".
Beckermann's film also shows frightening images of the current upsurge of anti-Semitism in Austria. A long sequence shot of a car driving along a foggy road sums up the contradictory movement of the film : to find a way into the future by going into the past". (Ruth Beckermann)