A Question Of Sunlight2019

                           a hauntingly strange film about memory …
                                – John Crowley, author/professor
     juxtaposes the jarring memories of 9/11 with the haunting trauma of the Holocaust …
                 – Karen Remmler, professor, Mount Holyoke College

Recorded in the shadow of the Trade Towers only months after their collapse, A Question of Sunlight links 9/11 with the Holocaust, via “the telling of memories” by visual artist José Urbach, witness to both. José speaks almost magically, from childhood to the present, and anywhere in between. He was a Polish child born into the Holocaust, and as he watched the first plane smash into The World Trade Center from his kitchen window in lower Manhattan, he had a radical flashback to his earliest childhood memories. He recalls former times, other windows … like the bombing of the Polish airport that triggered the start of World War II. The paradox? José was in the belly of his mother that day, to be born many months later. Unique to José’s telling is his desire to “actualize” his memories, to make them present and timely. He tells his stories vividly as if they were movies, in a continuous search for insight within the veils of memory which still haunt him. This unsettling vacuum between past and future is magnified by Fisher’s personal and found imagery laced within Urbach’s narrative – curtains flying out Paris windows; “Shock & Awe” on airport TV; rare footage by Joris Ivens from the seminal East German film Die Windrose – for resonance, or “to lend a breath of air …” hf

Format here is deceptively simple – talking head/jumpcuts/spare imagery/ minimal sounds – but as the film plays out over time the viewer is drawn into a weave of seen and/or imagined stories in a psychic coexistence of past and present, sandwiched within the prospect of yet another pending war …

notes
Archival material includes clips from Die Windrose (Joris Ivens, 1957) from DEFA collection housed at UMass/Amherst.

filmmaker - Holly Fisher
music - Lois V. Vierk
with - José Urbach, NY artist and Holocaust survivor