We meet director Sandra Beerends at Royal Theater Tuschinski. There she pauses for a moment to consider Abraham Tuschinski’s stumbling stone. He also plays a role in director Sandra Beerends’ film, but it is mainly about the lives of ‘ordinary’ unknown people. People who work in a sewing factory or go to the market. “The Holocaust is often central to stories about Jewish history. But I think it is important that people are remembered not only as victims, but also as people,” she says.
The story is fictional, but constructed from real archive footage. In the film you follow the young Amsterdam Ruscha who sends letters to her brother Max. This is a fictional character, but the things she experiences come from things that really happened.
All images shown come from one of the thousand archive films that Beerends watched from the Interwar period. She used about 250 of them, some of which lasted only three seconds. “I spent a total of five years working on the film. I really lived there like a monk for two years, but I also thought it was a privilege to see all those images and delve into all the people’s lives,” she says.
The film is now showing in cinemas.