By N. Buket Cengiz.
“It was a mission that felt almost impossible, which is a good thing for a documentary filmmaker.”
Once, Nelly Mousset-Vos is a successful classical singer, and Nadine Hwang, the daughter of the Chinese ambassador to Spain, lives in the bohemian circles in Paris. On the Christmas night of 1944, the two women, captives in the hands of Nazis, meet each other at the Ravensbruck concentration camp when Nadine asks Nelly to sing from Madame Butterfly. They fall in love, but get separated when Nelly is transferred to the Mauthausen concentration camp. After the war, the two lovers unite, move to Venezuela and spend the rest of their lives together.
Magnus Gertten explores their story in his film Nelly & Nadine (2022). Gertten was invited to Istanbul for the fifteenth edition of Documentarist, Turkey’s leading documentary film festival, where his three films on the Nazi concentration camp survivors who made a new beginning in Malmö were screened.
Can we regard Nelly & Nadine (2022) as part of a trilogy consisting of Harbour of Hope (2011) and Every Face Has a Name (2015)? In these three films, you work with archive footage shot on 28 April 1945 when 1948 survivors of Nazi concentration camps arrived in the harbour of Malmö in Sweden. How did you choose the specific survivors whose stories you told? How did you proceed from the first film to the second and from it to the third?
To be honest, I was rather reluctant to work with the Second World War and the Holocaust material in the beginning. If there’s a list of topics that a documentary filmmaker should avoid, it would have The Second World War as number one. We’ve all encountered these stories about the Nazis, the concentration camps, the black and white films from the battles, all our lives. What is there left to tell? But then I become so fascinated by a news reel that I discovered in 2007, where you could see survivors from the concentration camps arriving in Malmö, Sweden. The footage was so well shot, it was a collection of beautiful portraits of women taking their first steps in freedom. I became obsessed by the question: is it possible to find out who these anonymous women are? It was a mission that felt almost impossible, which is a good thing for a documentary filmmaker. It shouldn’t be too easy to do a doc!
I only intended to one doc. To the first doc Harbour of Hope we were only able to identify a couple of women from the archive footage. The little girl Irene, who lives in Johannesburg, South Africa, became the main character. The film is telling the big story, the historical context of these survivors arriving in Malmö and how a small Swedish city met them with open arms. The underlying message in the film is the importance of a helping hand.
I had a lot of international screenings of Harbour of Hope, and I remember coming to a screening in Jerusalem in 2012. At the Q & A after the screening, an old lady raised her hand and said in a low voice: “Excuse me, in the archive footage from the harbour of Malmö in 1945 you see a little girl standing with a blanket in her hand. I just want to say – it’s me”. In that moment we realised that we should continue investigating the secrets of the news reel and try to put more names to the faces. Our production team started to go deeper into the research, using social media, contacting organisations representing survivors, googling and internet research etc. We realised that several of these survivors coming to Malmö that specific day in 1945, still were alive. That led to Every Face Has a Name in 2015, a film which is like a” name giving ceremony”, where the survivors are watching the news reel and discovering themselves in the footage.
I never thought I would do more films, using the same archive footage as a starting point. So, I was quite sure that I had finished my work related to the survivors coming to Malmö in 1945. But then came a screening in Paris in November 2016. Just before the screening I received an email from the farmer Christian, who asked me for a meeting in Paris. There I met Sylvie and Christian at a café and they told me about Nelly and Nadine. I immediately realised that someone just had dropped the most beautiful love story in my lap.
I think it’s fair to describe the three films as a trilogy, even though it was never planned like that. I feel that it was the stories that pushed me forward. Every new discovery of a face we could put a name and a story to, made it impossible to look the other way. These films had to be made and it was my responsibility.
What was your role in Nelly’s granddaughter Sylvie Blanchi’s decision to go through her grandmother’s personal archives and uncover her story? How did your collaboration with her start and develop? What sort of challenges did you, together or individually, face during this process?
When I first met Sylvie, she was very reluctant to take part in a film. As you see in my film, she has a hard time with starting to read her grandmother’s diary and opening the archives that was kept in the attic. In a way, this was very lucky. It meant that I was able to open the film with a woman who realises that she needs to confront the silence and the secrets in her family. I’m there to document the start of the journey, which gives the film an important drive and movement forward.
To be able to shoot scenes like these is always a question about building trust. After a couple of meetings and discussions she started to trust me on doing the film about her grandmother and her relationship with Nadine. Sylvie had also seen Every Face Has a Name and knew my style as a filmmaker. But it’s also about being in the right place at the right time. I was there when she realised that this is a journey she has to make.
We were shooting with Sylvie for four years and there’s always ups and downs in a relationship to a main character. The biggest problem is often the time it takes to make a documentary. The slow process creates uncertainty and impatience. As a filmmaker I’m used to the fact that it takes 3-5 years to finish a documentary, but that’s so much tougher for the people in your film. But she also needed time for her own journey and eventually she was very happy with the outcome. She felt that the film represented her journey in a truthful way.
Nelly and Nadine move to Caracas in 1950 and present themselves as cousins while they live together. Do you think, this decision of living their relationship discreetly was simply due to the homophobia of the times, or did it have other motivations related with their captivity experience in the Nazi concentration camps?
You must remember that this is a film about two women built on fragments. There are so many things we don’t know and so many phases in their lives that are undocumented. We haven’t found anything written about this. A qualified guess would be that the women tried to live ‘under the radar’. They wanted to spend their lives together, but in a very discreet way. They found a safe haven in Caracas, often spending time with other homosexual friends. So, the general homophobia of the times seems like a relevant explanation. But obviously they felt they needed a restart in their lives, far away from Europe and the memories of the concentration camps.
At a later stage of their life, Nelly and Nadine decide to publish the story of their love based on Nelly’s diary and their letters. Isn’t it interesting that they attempt to publish their love story before declaring their relationship to their families?
Yes, it’s revealing that they wanted the world to know about their love story in a book, while they never were able to talk about it openly in the family. I don’t think this is uncommon. One of the themes in the film is about the difficulties in expressing your real identity and openly reveal who you are when it comes to love and sexuality.
They cannot find a publisher, so this stays as an unrealized dream. Years later, with this film you introduce their story to us, making their dream come true. What are your feelings about this?
I feel honoured and very humble. To be able to bring this story into the light and spread it to the world is of course the greatest of gifts. The mission of a documentary filmmaker is often to reveal stories that have been hidden, neglected and suppressed. Nelly & Nadine represents so many other lesbians and homosexual couples, whose stories never have been told. I’ve always tried to sneak in love stories in my documentaries, regardless of the topic. Now, I finally got the opportunity to tell a big, universal love story, that we all can relate to.
Your film is so beautifully made, so delicate, poetic. You combine a mesmerizing visual language with the literariness of extracts from their letters and Nelly’s diary, which we hear throughout the film, together with an enchanting soundtrack. For those who are not familiar with such examples of documentary film Nelly & Nadine can be surprising, almost confusing, with this beauty in expression. What would you say about that, what were the reactions to your film in this sense?
Thanks, I’m happy to hear this. It has always been important to me to make documentaries in a poetic style. I respect that documentary is a very wide genre, where a lot of films are told with a journalistic approach and in a rather basic visual tv-style. It’s a big and talented team behind Nelly & Nadine, and we all shared the same vision. This is how we wanted the story to be told. The editor Jesper Osmund and cinematographer Caroline Troedsson were key team members in the process of making this film.
Nelly & Nadine is a multi-layered narrative construction. The visual style – especially during the excerpts from the diary – is metaphorical and poetic. The way we tell the story is inspired by fiction films, and we consider the creative documentary as a specific art form.
N. Buket Cengiz is a freelance writer on culture and arts, focusing on music and cinema. She holds a PhD in Turkish Studies from Leiden University and works at Kadir Has University in Istanbul as a lecturer.
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