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Looking for a Filmmaker

  • Date: 14 Jan, 2014 at 11:30AM,
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  • Before they are all gone, it is my dream to see a documentary with Czech children (now middle-aged) of former non-communist and communist political prisoners from the 1950s, exchanging their stories in front of the camera. It could help to gain insight into their unresolved pain and anger related to the past by the opportunity to listen to the pain of the “other.”
By Jana Svehlova (jsvehlova (at) yahoo.com)

The storytelling approach was used by a psychologist Dan Bar-On To Reflect and Trust (TRT) between two groups — descendants of Nazi perpetrators and Jewish descendants of Holocaust survivors.

In the context of inflexible conflicts, working-through helps to live with the painful past better than one has up to now. In the absence of this process, the repressed content may continue to interfere with one’s feelings, attitudes and behavior. Such feelings, attitudes and behavior have trans-generational consequences and create distrust, suspiciousness and lack of discourse within the society. The working-through process may achieve what one of the Holocaust survivors’ descendant said about listening to the descendants of the Nazis: “It feels like I removed wax from my ears.”

Skillfully made documentary has the potential to build a relationship between these two groups and would help the society with self-reflection.

EDITOR: Hilda Bank, Ph.D.