Charlotte (1980)

In 1939, Charlotte Salomon leaves Berlin to seek refuge at her grandparents’ villa in the south of France. A little later, war breaks out, and Charlotte must, besides forgetting all she left behind, deal with her grandmother’s depression, and her mother’s suicide. To fight despair, Charlotte starts to paint, producing over one thousand images. “Is my life real, or is it theater?” This is the title she gives her body of work, which highlights her former life in Berlin. She finds herself though her art, but in 1943 is deported to Germany and Auschwitz.

Weisz regarded Charlotte as one of his most personal films. “I could divide my life into the period before Charlotte and after Charlotte,” he once said. To make the film, he temporarily moved to Berlin — the city where his father, Géza Weisz, spent the first thirty years of his life before fleeing to the Netherlands to escape the Nazis. “That brought me very close to my own history.”

Director: Frans Weisz.
Writers: Judith Herzberg, Frans Weisz.
Stars: Birgit Doll, Elisabeth Trissenaar, Brigitte Horney, Max Croiset, Peter Capell, Derek Jacobi, Buddy Elias, Peter Faber, Eric Vaessen, Maria Machado, Shireen Strooker, Lous Hensen, Yoka Berretty, Patricia Hodge, Irene Jarosch, Leonard Frank, Shaun Lawton, Ton Lensink, Johanna Sophia, Harke de Roos.
Cinematographers: Jerzy Lipman, Theo van de Sande.
Composer: Egisto Macchi.