Free | IMDB Videos
Posted: 10/7/2011
Confliction/Homeland -- Germans
Americans
Two Homelands - Nazism & Allied bombs
My mother grew up in Germany, playing in the rubble left by Allied bombers. I grew up in the US with the tacit idea that Germans were Nazis, and therefore evil.
CONFLICTION/HOMELAND is a poetic/performative documentary, a personal essay film that explores some of the following questions:
If history is made up of memories, fragments and rubble left after events, how do we make sense of our pasts? How do personal histories intersect with national histories? What happens when two separate, conflicting views are presented to the same young person who is trying to make sense things? When governments use bombs as a strategy to defeat adversaries, can love or art bridge cultural differences and heal wounds between enemies ?
A strong mother, a deceased GI father, Montgomery Clift* and Humphrey Jennings films, a confused filmmaker and an acquiescent German Mayor, all appear in the work. From US Army Air Force flyovers of Dachau, Bremen, Berlin and Frankfurt in the spring of 1945, to Berlin s architectural reconstructions in January 2000, heimat and Hollywood movies, interviews, memorial concerts and more all add up to explore the inventory taken in CONFLICTION/HOMELAND.
(*in the 83min. version)