PAPIROSEN

Papirosen is an intimate portrait of the director’s family over the course of a decade, following four generations still troubled by a war that’s never spoken of. The filmis a fascinating journey across time, cities, characters and international political events, focusing on a nouveau riche Argentine Jewish family. There are two points of view coexisting in the footage. That of Gaston, at three distinct moments during the 2000s: Mateo’s birth, a trip to Florida four years later, and the present. And then there’s the family archive, shot in a variety of domestic formats since the late 1950s by Janek, Gaston’s paternal grandfather, who committed suicide and to whom the film is dedicated. Despite the formal distance, there’s an uncanny aesthetic connection linking them. The family’s economic status changed abruptly, from broke postwar immigrants to extreme wealth.