Magnus Gertten on Nelly & Nadine

Courtesy of Wolfe Video

Magnus Gertten has been making films about political refugees and war (Only the Devil Lives Without Hope and Every Face Has a Name) in the past decade. He continues to do that in a non-direct way in Nelly & Nadine. In this film, he centers Sylvie’s revelations about her grandmother, Nelly. She knew that Nelly was a grandiose singer, but did not know about her prior relationship with Nadine. It is a riveting, profound film that makes us be curious about history and how people’s lives are preserved over time.

Nelly & Nadine recently made its New York premiere at NewFest 2022. I spoke with Gertten spoke over the phone about working with an archive’s limitations, creating a safe space with Sylvie, and exploring the unknown when making a documentary.

- NOTE: This conversation is edited & condensed for clarity, & contains spoiler alerts. -

EF: As you began to film with a lot of uncertainties, did you begin with following Sylvie, or the archival war footage?

MG: It all started with me discovering this news reel that we have in the beginning of the film, which is a reel that shows how survivors coming from the German concentration camps. They're actually arriving in my hometown in Malmö, Sweden. I never thought I would do anything that was related to the Second World War or the Holocaust. I became so fascinated by the faces in that newsreel, and one of the faces was actually, Nadine. But it took me many years to find out the full story about what happened to Nadine and then find out the connection to Nelly. I found out when I had a screening of another film in Paris, I was contacted by Sylvie and her husband Cristian. They had told me we have this big story, so maybe you want to look into it. I met them in 2016 and then they showed me some images and called me they had a story. But at that point, Sylvie was not really into being a part of the film. But then I went back to the farm, and I talked to her and then we started the process with doing the film. 

EF: How did you get Sylvie to be opened up about this film? 

MG: I had several discussions with her. I think she trusted me as a filmmaker, because she had seen some of my earlier work. But I think the main reason is that she felt she had to go into this story because this is also a film about a family secret. It's a film about the silence in the family. No one ever talked about what Nelly did during the Second World War. That is her [Sylvie’s] grandmother, and nobody talked about in the family who was that woman that Nellie was living together with. She was confronting the family secrets. I think she needed to do that and I came at the right moment. I could be there when she opened up, opened the boxes, checked out the photos when she started to read the diary of her grandmother, etc. So I was lucky to be there exactly when it started. That's how the film was built as well. It's built as Silvie’s journey into family secrets, which opens up to be this huge, huge love story.

EF: Sylvie’s opening up to diving into the secrets provides some healing and relief from the silence that she'd been carrying for several years.

MG: Absolutely. When the film starts, she's quite uncomfortable with things. It's because she loves her grandmother very much and [her] starting to read the diary, where your grandmother has written about her experiences in the concentration camps. That's a hard thing because you don't know what you're going to find there. So it was very hard for her in the beginning. It took five years to do the film. At the end, she was so relieved, as she was also very proud of being a part of this love story, which she now represents by traveling to festivals. I think she's going to write a book about everything because there's so much material and this is an important story. We all know that the story's been around for forever, but it's so rare that we are able to document them and tell them like I was fortunate to do. Because I have the words of the women, I have the diary, I have the film reels. I have so much material and that is so rare. It's a privilege to be a part of telling this story.

EF: I can't wait to see the further documentations that Sylvie's going to write in her book. Within this film, there's a lot of stuff that they [the characters] need to survive like identities where Nelly went on to be named Claire as her war name as mentioned in the film, and the different ways that Nelly, Nadine and the other featured concentration camp people had to survive.

MG: It's a complicated story. As you're saying, there was a war name for Nelly. She was called Claire [her war name] and that's what Nadine called Nelly for the rest of her life So there's many layers in the film, there's this war resistance layer. There's this big love story developing, of course, and it's also about as, as every film should be, it's not primarily about the war or the Holocaust. That's the playground of the story because it's a story about being an artist, being a human being. It's about identity, there's so many layers in the film and that's what you want to create; a rich film. This material really gave me the opportunity to create a great film where you can investigate so many layers and that's why the audience goes so deep into the story. I get so many questions and I get so many reactions after the film, wherever I'm traveling with it. It's screened. I don't know, 15 to 20 international film festivals every month. So it's really out there.

EF: I see a lot of that richness and beautiful quality in the archival footage and different photographs. There's not much written about Nelly and Nadine in a huge source of output. How do you work with the limits of the archive or what is known about them from other publications?

MG: What I'm working with, is actual fragments of two women's lives. I don't know everything about what happened and no one knows because they’re dead since many years, we're not able to ask them anything. But we still have the diary where we can hear Nelly’s words and we have a couple of documents also where we can read Nadine's words as well. But there's so many limitations. There's an obvious question. What do you see when you're listening to a diary that is written inside a concentration camp? What kind of images am I going to use? I'm not writing a book, I'm doing a film. So that was also a real challenge. We invented this layer in the film, which I call “the poetic archive footage layer,” where we are using quite poetic images in order to illustrate the inner emotions of Nelly when she's writing from inside the camp. There's many limitations but I was also so lucky with having quite unique archival material. I had 8mm film reels private from the couple when they lived in Venezuela. I also had the diary, of course, and there was so many amazing photos of them, and so on. So I couldn't complain. I mean, you're always quite scared when you do a film that is based on an archive that will end up boring and typically a TV documentary from the Second World War. But I think we created a poetic style that really brought us into the love and the drama of this story because that's what it's all about. I'm also proud that it's not just a story about what happened then. It's also a story that resonates with things happening today, all over the world. We have over 70 countries where [they] are not accepting basic human rights like LGBTQ+ rights. This film is not likely to be screened in China, for instance, which Nadine has a relationship to, or it would at least be very hard to do. So it's a quite relevant film of today. It's a political film for today as well and that's important to me.

EF: The materials are elevated through Nelly’s singing. When did you find out that Nelly was a singer and how did you incorporate her recordings as part of the soundtrack for the film?

MG: I found out quite early that she was a singer and also because I met Sylvie. She knew a lot about that, obviously, but we also found some old recordings of her voice. uring the process of the film, when we were doing research we found an opera that she recorded in Brussels at the end of the 40s and there was some old tape reels also in the boxes. I thought I was quite fascinating that art was such a big part of Nelly’s life. and you can also see in the writing she's doing in the diary that this is a person who has been reading a lot of poetry and she's has this ability of writing about love and writing about her experiences that you really love listening to. It's fantastic material. It's t her love to arts that makes her survive in the concentration camps.

EF: Sylvie is not only reflecting on the past but also is thinking about the future as well when she listens to Nelly's music or hearing some stuff that she's finding out for the first time.

MG: Absolutely. She's reflecting about her own life, her own relationship to love and also in a way she's reflecting on what silence in the family can do to you. She's determined not to have the same duty in the same way in her own family because she has young children, and so on. I think that's quite important. That's the cool thing when you're working with a film for a long time, you see the main character that you're working with and the filming that she develops so much. I think she found a good place for herself and in the family now she's able to talk about things more freely and openly. I think she feels that she's some kind of an ambassador for the family story and for the family history. She will work a lot for many years with this story and try to spread it to the world.

Correction on October 28, 2022: An earlier draft of the article misidentified Nelly’s relation to Sylvie as Sylvie’s mother instead of her grandmother.