Matrilineal

Director Caterina Klusemann was born in Italy as the child of a Venezuelan-Polish-Jewish photographer and a German painter. Her family was not a large one: she grew up with her grandmother, mother and sister in a villa in Italy. Her father died in 1981. But of her grandmother, the undisputed head of the family, she knows hardly anything. She knows that she came to Venezuela from Italy in 1948 and that she must have experienced World War II in Europe. But grandma refuses to discuss the subject. Still, the filmmaker is convinced that her determined reticence is harming the entire family. Especially her mother, who is housebound since her husband’s death as the result of a depression. Klusemann interviews all her family members, and even appears before the camera herself, but nobody wants her to continue with the project. When the director finally hears her grandfather’s name for the first time, she draws strength from it to keep on searching. She travels to Poland, where her mother was born, and arranges a confrontation with her grandmother, who reacts adversely and angrily. The camera gives Klusemann the courage to persist, even if the door is repeatedly slammed in her face. The spectator is forced to go along with the restless and intrusive camera with which Klusemann resolutely follows her grandmother. Klusemann perseveres in both a painful and amusing way, and is eventually rewarded. She is currently using the same footage to make an evening-long documentary.