THE SILENCED WALLS
| 2015 – 88′ – Documentary, War, Period & History.
Written by: Sabrina Van Tassel.
Directed by: Sabrina Van Tassel.
Official Competition COLCOA 2015 (International Premiere).
In French with English subtitles.
A Under The Milky Way / Distrib Films US release. |
In the suburb of Drancy lies an unadorned block of low-income housing. With some of the cheapest rents to be had in Paris, it is the residence of some 500 impoverished retirees, recently homeless, and mentally disabled. On the surface everything seems normal enough, children improvise games beneath its stark façade. But what do the residents know of the site’s dark history? What would they say if they knew their home was haunted – by 80,000 ghosts? The Silenced Walls explores the building that in 1940 became the central internment camp for Jews during the Nazi occupation of France. Nearly every Jew arrested in France came through its austere lodgings, most on their way to the death camps of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. Known to Jews as the “antechamber of death,” it remains the most notorious Holocaust site in all of France, at once damned and sacred. But what does all this mean to the people who live there now? Is it possible to find happiness between the same walls that have been born witness to such misery?