Canadian Women Film Directors Database
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The Walnut Tree

Directed by Elida Schogt
Canada, 2000 (documentary / experimental, 11 minutes, colour)
The Walnut Tree
Image: © Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre

Film Description:
"As a follow-up to the award-winning Zyklon Portrait, The Walnut Tree offers a striking combination of documentary and experimental approaches to examine Holocaust memory, the family, and the role of photography in history. Three girls in Dutch costumes stand posing for their father. This fleeting moment, made static in a photograph, is contrasted with the moving imagery of railway tracks—tracks that carried the death transports—now blurred with memory and time. In a matter-of-fact tone, [Elida] Schogt's mother describes how her parents tore several pictures out of the family albums when they fled the Nazis in 1943. The albums were kept safe in a warehouse in Amsterdam. Schogt's mother recounts how the walnut tree her parents planted was cut down during the war. After the war, her sister finds the tree with several new shoots—now a huge tree that bears quantities and quantities of delicious fresh walnuts every year."
-- Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre (source)

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Notes about The Walnut Tree

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Quote about The Walnut Tree

"In this emotional film, fragments of an interrupted childhood emerge from the devastation of the Holocaust. The film is a reflection on how families capture life's sweet moments with the camera while our real stories lie beyond the frame."
-- Liz Czach (source)


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