My Father’s Secrets: Do you know the comics that this animated movie is based on?

Based on a comic book

My father’s secrets is from Michelle Kichka’s graphic novel The Second Generation – What I Didn’t Tell My Dad. The son of a Holocaust survivor, he recalls a youth spent in the shadow of the Shoah: “Comics seemed to me the best way to tell this, to touch the hearts of readers of all ages, through humor, poetry, distance and imagination. To create an intimate and personal relationship with the reader. »

How to represent the Holocaust?

Vera Belmont For a long time he wanted to dedicate a film to the Holocaust and found such an enterprise impossible. His previous films, Milena and Saving the Wolves, were already made during and after World War II. His family members were deported themselves. “I always thought that you couldn’t shoot in a concentration camp. How to show the Auschwitz camp? How to show what is not visible? »

Adaptation from the comic book Michael Kichka Let him approach the subject without showing the camps and ask the following question: How to live after escaping from the camps? The choice of animation is not neutral: “Indeed, with its elegance and precision, the painting makes it possible to present the ‘unrepresentable’ and approach the most serious questions with lightness and humor, like Spiegelman’s Maus d’Art.” »

Continue the memory and word of exiles

The choice of animation makes it possible for the younger generation to reach and understand the events of the Holocaust as they are remembered. Vera Belmont “At a time when France is republishing Mein Kampf; where racial theories are reinforced in political discourse; where anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, xenophobia deeply affect the social body; Where the stigmatization of the other, the foreigner, the suburban youth becomes a refrain in the media, it seems urgent and necessary to return to the worst human history of the 20th century, always. Emphasizes how disgusting and unacceptable the ideology underlying these positions is, and how new generations must measure the enormous danger it represents. »

Discover animation

This is the first time Vera Belmont Interferes with animation. He collaborated with the animation studio Je suis bien content de Marc Jousset, which produced Persepolis and the Avril et le monde spoof. “It’s true that fiction and animation are two completely different fields, sometimes I found a lot of time – ten years passed before I bought the rights and today (smiles) – but, in the end, it’s always about staging. »