My Life, Part 2

In her autobiographical essay film, Levi reconstructs her own family history using her mother’s estate, in order to reflect on the relationship between private and public historiography. Her mother, a Jewish woman who survived the Nazi era in Germany, left her daughter an extensive archive comprising audio cassettes, 16 mm and Super 8 film, video, photographs and written documents. From this material, Levi develops a personal yet political exploration of Jewish-German identity. In a voice-over, she comments on the selected material without shying away from the tension between what is left unsaid and what is said. In a tentative reconstruction, her mother’s legacy is arranged in such a way as to raise the question of where things had to be repressed or displaced: ‘The film is about trauma and about how, on both macro and micro levels, history is constantly being produced, archived and categorised.’ (Angelika Levi) (df)