One of the most loved immersive experiences at the Lazzaretto Vecchio, where it had its world premiere, LETTERS FROM DRANCY is a deeply moving piece about the relationship between a mother and daughter separated by the tragedy of the Holocaust.
Using 360-degree video, stylised animation and volumetric environments, Darren Emerson’s latest work is a reflection on the themes of love, resilience and reconciliation that has the immense merit of bringing the Holocaust back to a dimension that is no longer merely historical but becomes profoundly human. In an attempt to remind us, today, that what happened does not concern an era and society foreign to our own but always touches ordinary people, people like us.
Upcoming screenings:
Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center | From 1 October | Chicago, Illinois, USA | US Premiere
London Film Festival | 6 October – 22 October 2023 | London, UK | UK Premiere
LETTERS FROM DRANCY: a work that deeply touched the Venice Immersive audience
AGNESE – Darren, congratulations on Venice! I saw many people leaving the booth where LETTERS FROM DRANCY was with tears in their eyes and discussing the piece in such emotional ways – I was one of them, actually! Were you satisfied with this premiere?
DARREN EMERSON – We are very happy with the reactions we received in Venice and the way the audience connected with this work. The bond between mother and daughter that we present in the story is universal. Some of the audience felt a deep connection to the story because of their own family experiences of the Holocaust, or because they had lost relatives close to them. Many people came and told us that they will carry LETTERS FROM DRANCY in their hearts, and that makes us feel very proud.
Furthermore, we were honored that Marion Deichmann (whose story we feature in the experience) was with us at the Lido for the presentation panel chaired by Liz Rosenthal, and I really got the impression that people who went to speak with Marion saw in her a connection to their own personal stories. She is an incredible woman, amazing for 90 years old: she turned up at the Lido in sunglasses, a fine shirt, white trousers. So elegant and cool lady. And you could see that she was really happy to meet those who approached her, to be able to share her life with them. She is planning to also be with us in London, at LFF Expanded, the next stop on LETTERS FROM DRANCY’s international tour.
A. – You give the audience a chance to go deep inside themselves and really create a strong connection to your work and this beautiful relationship that you portray between Marion and her mother.
D. E. – When you work on a narrative like this, as a director, you have to connect with the emotion of the story and really go deep into your own humanity to write the scenes in the most effective and creative way you can. But that is very tiring and sometimes during the production you also have to become a little numb to the emotional impact of it in order to protect yourself and focus on the job you have to do. So it is nice when you finally show it to people, and see their emotional reactions to it. It is a meaningful story that is important to talk about and we want people to remember and tell their friends about it.
We are getting now to the stage where there are only a few of the last generation of Holocaust survivors left. The memory is slowly fading and one of the things the Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center wanted, when they commissioned this work, was to find an innovative way to keep stories like this alive for generations to come.
Reaching out beyond the festival context
D. E. – Venice is a fantastic place to exhibit a work like this, but of course it’s a bit exclusive, so we’re also looking at other avenues. The Illinois Holocaust Museum will screen this piece in their permanent VR gallery, in rotation with other two films that were made by East City Films for this project: so, there’s LETTERS FROM DRANCY which I directed, Walk to Westerbork directed by Mary Matheson, and Escape to Shanghai directed by Charlotte Mikkelborg.
What we are trying to do (led by one of our Executive Producers Dan Tucker) is to get other Jewish museums or Holocaust museums around the world to program these three pieces; we did invite some museum curators in Venice to experience the work and we’ll do the same in London. The idea is to create connections and bring people together to program this piece in their galleries or museums. Obviously not every museum has virtual reality, but it’s becoming a bit more accessible, so that’s the direction we’re going for. For East City Films making work with a clear vision for distribution and audiences is very much a goal.
We are getting now to the stage where there are only a few of the last generation of Holocaust survivors left. The memory is slowly fading and one of the things the Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center wanted, when they commissioned this work, was to find an innovative way to keep stories like this alive for generations to come.
We have also made 360 video versions of all 3 experiences for the Quest platform that’s specifically for education and wider distribution. In this way you don’t need a complex headset or a huge computer to make it work, nor are you compelled to show it one person at a time: the Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center already does a great job of outreach in schools, and they’re keen for these stories to be seen in an educational setting across the globe. We need to get as much reach as possible!
From the book to the immersive piece
A. – When did you first hear of Marion Deichmann’s story?
D. E. – At that time we were finishing the production of our previous work In Pursuit of Repetitive Beats (don’t miss XRMust’s interview with Darren Emerson at this link)… which is a very, very different work. We were contacted by the museum and among the various proposals we receive from various institutions, this one immediately caught our attention. We are passionate about purpose-driven storytelling, especially in VR, and so we felt right away that this was a collaboration that we really wanted to pursue. So, when the first In Pursuit of Repetitive Beats exhibition was over, we flew to Chicago and met with the museum’s team.
It was on this trip that we first met the three women who appear in these films. In our first meeting with Marion she told us about her story, and I was immediately transfixed. Not only the narrative of the story itself, but also the way she told it, her outlook on life, her nature, her elegance. She’s obviously a very resilient person, but she comes across as rather delicate, and the way she talked about everything really set me on the path of how I was going to make the work, in a creative sense. And it was clear from that very first meeting that it was going to be a story about the central relationship between Marion and her mother and the bond they shared.
A lot of the metaphors we use in the film, like the birds and elements of nature like the trees and the ocean, are about this idea that we carry our loved ones with us throughout our life, in our memories, and their energy is always around us, guiding us.
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From a creator’s point of view I felt a great responsibility in terms of how to represent a story like this, which is so nuanced. Marion shared so many details with us, like how her mother used to play Schubert at the piano – and we actually used his music in the soundtrack – but there were also some details that would not have worked very well in VR, so there were specific artistic choices to make, and an editorial process to go through.
In that first meeting we also discovered that Marion had already published a book, written in German but also available in French and English. So, on the long flight home to London I read it and discovered that it was very detailed and accurately described the journey she had undertaken. The opening scene of LETTERS FROM DRANCY is actually taken from that text: a description of a recurring nightmare she used to have of being trapped in a room full of mirrors with a German officer hunting her. It was such an evocative dream, and immediately I set about thinking how I could recreate it in VR.
A. – It is a very visionary scene and it haunts you.
D. E. – There is this feeling of constant threat in the book that I found very useful for our work. One of the main challenges was to filter all the information in the text and streamline the narrative down to its core elements. We could not talk about all the people in her life – the grandmother, the uncle and others – but we wanted to reach the heart of the story, which is Marion and her mother.
But then her mother is taken away by the Nazis, and Marion is separated from her family, taken in by those people in the French Resistance who were brave enough to take a stand and risk their own lives to shelter her. We follow Marion throughout this journey and I try to articulate her isolation, the feeling of loneliness of a lost child, who is only able to get through it all by thinking that her mother is alive out there, somewhere. Obviously the tragedy is the discovery that her mother is not coming back but talking to Marion, I always had the feeling that her mother was always there within, just below the surface. A lot of the metaphors we use in the film, like the birds and elements of nature like the trees and the ocean, are about this idea that we carry our loved ones with us throughout our life, in our memories, and their energy is always around us, guiding us. Marion says it herself in the film, she says “She is present in me, my mother is present in me’. So I tried to find a way, without exaggerating the point of view, to bring this spiritual idea out of the narrative in a fairly delicate way.
The role of animation in conveying memories and sharing the message
A. – The animation element is beautiful, very intuitive in the things it expresses. It helps convey that feeling of peace that, especially at the end, emerges from Marion’s admission that she does not hate the people who did this but feels ‘disgusting pity’ for them. Has the use of animation always been part of your creative project?
D. E. – I always knew that was the animation style I wanted to adopt. I immediately looked at hand-drawn animation work using graphite, charcoal and pastel for inspiration. I wrote the animation script with the idea that negative empty space would play a large role in the execution of the animation scenes. The first reason for this is more technical: I find that negative space allows the virtual camera to move around objects without causing motion sickness.
For example, when Alice Deichmann packs her bags to leave with the men who would take her to Drancy, the camera starts behind her as she opens a suitcase, and then pans completely around her until we are facing her, and then it tracks in to the open lid of the suitcase to create a transition wipe. If I had done all that with a real or virtual camera in an environment with a lot of detail to anchor to, the physical sensation would have been horrible! Whereas using negative space makes such a scene much more beautiful and elegant.
The other reason was more of a narrative one: that whole scene is a memory that belongs to a nine-year-old girl and 80 years of life have passed since then. When the incident occurred (Marion’s mother Alice being taken away) she is remembering something she was not prepared for, that happened one morning like any other.
And so I always thought that, in her story, these moments she remembers are full of intensity and confusion, but they are also fragments of everything that was happening that morning. There is a fragility because of the time that has passed which removes some of the detail, but the resonance of the memory is so strong, it is images that are seared into the brain. This was the effect I was trying to communicate in the stylistic approach to this animation scene.
With the script written and the creative approach decided, we then worked with our brilliant animator Marco Sandeman and shot those scenes with actors in a motion capture studio in London (Target 3D). What is odd and wonderful is that my daughter, Betty Emerson, plays Marion as a child! When I watch the film and see the animated Marion running and moving, I actually see my daughter, who is about the same age, the same height, and has the same hair. In a very personal way I connect my own beloved daughter to the story of Marion, and it really hits me.
We also had actors playing Alice and the men walking beside her. Once we had captured these elements, we had to animate them, using 3D models and creating a shader in Cinema 4D that could convey the effect we were looking for; the feeling of a living image with indistinct undulation along the edges; as if it was hand drawn and animated in a traditional way. We go back to animation style in the final credits, where we match the final image of Marion on the beach looking out to sea with an overlaid animated version.
A. – Tell us about that specific scene.
I knew I wanted to take the film to that beach in Normandy, near Mont Saint Michel, where Marion had been many times with the French family who had taken her in during WW2, and I knew I wanted to match that image with animation at the end for the credits.
At the end of the film Marion talks about her thoughts on life, forgiveness and a sort of philosophy she has about looking to the future, so the beach was a great setting for this. When the image turns back into animation, we the audience see a flock of birds dance on the horizon. When you consider in a previous scene that Alice Diechmann metaphorically turns into a bird, it is therefore a moment that we connect nature, the universe and the energy within it to this special connection between mother and daughter. There is a feeling of peace associated with these images. Marion is at peace. She is at the end of her life, and despite everything she has lived a good life and has a philosophy that includes forgiveness.
Holocaust: not “just” history
D. E. – A 90-year-old Holocaust survivor is treated almost like a deity, due to a combination of age and of course surviving such an event. People want/need to speak with her, and understand the life lessons she has to share. But, of course, she is a normal person who apart from the significant horror of the Holocaust and the tremendous resilience she has been required to endure, in many other respects she has just lived a normal life. She has had children, she has been married and divorced. She has had her ups and downs like everybody. And I think one of the most significant things she says in LETTERS FROM DRANCY is that she hopes her mother would have been proud of her.
The last thing her mother said to her before she was taken away was to ‘be good’. And that’s something that I think Marion still feels inside at ninety years old. But the human element in all this – and perhaps the most moving aspect of the story – is that, in the film when Marion is speaking about what she thinks her mother would have said about the choices she has made, she says: ‘I think she would be proud of me. Well, of most of the things I’ve done,’ and then she gives a little sigh.
For me it’s a very important moment because in those words you see that she is not a diety, but just an ordinary person and you understand that the Holocaust happened to ordinary people. Good people, bad people, annoying people, funny people, rich people and poor people. Literally millions of ordinary people were murdered, none of whom deserved to die. And that’s the real horror of it.
I think this message is important because when the last Holocaust survivors are no longer with us, we will need to remember that they were ordinary people and that tomorrow something similar could happen to me, to you, to someone else. That’s why I wanted LETTERS FROM DRANCY to be a story about mothers and daughters. This is not a piece about concentration camps. Alice Diechmann is murdered in a concentration camp, but we did not go there. It is simply a personal and emotional journey, which is something we can all connect with.
Finding joy into a difficult subject matter
A. – You told me earlier that in working on this work you had to numb yourself from the more emotional aspects from time to time. Were there difficult moments for you in the production process?
D. E. – The writing part was challenging. One of the first things we did was to interview the three main ladies, in Chicago, with a regular camera. Then I took the footage of Marion’s interview home and spent a couple of weeks editing it, because they were very long interviews. Marion’s story is beautiful because it’s really a journey… the beginning, the border crossing, the kidnapping of her mother, Normandy, Paris and finally Drancy. Each of these moments had to be scripted and planned in some way to understand how best to approach it, narratively and technically. Each part of the journey has a slightly different style: some scenes are 360 degree video, some are animated, some are more stylised, some are 3D volumetric environments. We mix 3DOF and 6DOF.
Emotionally I think the most challenging period was filming with Marion in Paris, and in particular two locations: the apartment block where she has lived as a child, and from where her mother was taken away 80 years prior, and then the location of Drancy, where her mother had been held with thousands of other Jews, before being taken to Auschwitz. I think for Marion in particular it was a very, very difficult time. She hadn’t been inside that apartment block for 80 years, and she had never been to Drancy before.
Outside at Drancy there’s a memorial to the Holocaust, and its centerpiece is a wooden train carriage that was used to deport Jews to the concentration camps. All Marion knew about the end of her mother’s life was that she had been taken to Auschwitz on one of those trains, in convoy number 12. And we don’t know if it’s connected, of course, but on that carriage in Drancy it is clearly marked with the number 12. And so Marion had the feeling that it could be the very carriage that had carried her mother away. That moment was really hard for her and the only thing we shot with Marion in Drancy was the scene of her standing in front of the convoy.
I think this message is important because when the last Holocaust survivors are no longer with us, we will need to remember that they were ordinary people and that tomorrow something similar could happen to me, to you, to someone else.
During filming I am very focused, but the team we have was a fantastic support in those moments. We have a great producer, Micaela Blitz, a fantastic executive producer, Ashley Cowan, but in general the whole crew took care of each other and took care of Marion. This sense of care, and teamwork allowed me to disassociate a bit and focus on what I needed to do and finish the shoot on time, with all the material I needed to build this VR experience.
Of all the VR works we have produced over the years, despite the subject matter and some difficult moments, I would have to say that this shoot was the most joyful thing I have ever done. Marion loved it. She loved going to France, being with the team, walking arm in arm with everyone. It was a really great and positive experience and I’m glad that somehow this spirit comes through in the film as well.
A. – It’s not a dark film. Many people cried, but I don’t think for the darkness as much as for the love you see.
D. E. – I think you are correct about that. The tears we see at the end of the experience do not reflect the unbearable horror of the Holocaust, but instead the sense of hope, love and peace that Marion is able to conjure. It is a film about love, the love that binds us to the people we care about most. It is also about courage, the courage of individuals and families that risk it all in the face of hatred to do the right thing. To stand up for the best in us, and pick us up when we are down. The Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center often use this word ‘Upstander’ to describe people that make a conscious choice to not go along with the status quo if they see injustice or persecution. In the film this spirit is represented by the people who took Marion in, the social worker who moved Marion to Normandy, and mostly the Parigny family from the town of St. Hilaire du Harcouet who protected her and brought her into their own family. This is love and sacrifice and I hope people walk away moved by it.
On future plans and stories to tell
D. E. – My work is always focused on creating an emotional journey, and looking at communities of people and human connection. In In Pursuit of Repetitive Beats it was euphoria, excitement and finding your tribe. In LETTERS FROM DRANCY, it was love, resilience, forgiveness.
I would certainly like to work with a museum again because they are doing really brilliant work and are extremely creative in the way they approach it.
But I’m subject agnostic in many ways…I’m interested in the story, and the human connection. Technology is just a tool to be able to tell the stories, and isn’t a reason in itself to engage with the work.
A. – It is interesting what you just said about bringing out emotions with your work. Is there one in particular, or any human aspect that you would love to discuss?
D. E. – I often dwell on the concept of memory, and how they are processed emotionally, and I have to admit I am a rather sentimental person. A bit of a romantic. I’m definitely interested in exploring the concept of forgiveness more. Because I think it is a challenging idea, and the emotions connected to it are so powerful. I have, for example, looked at stories of forgiveness in the criminal justice system. The concept of reconciliation is of great interest to me…. How people can go through really horrible things, but still find the ability to reconcile, forgive and move on.
It happened in South Africa, just to cite one example. In a way, it might be the most important thing that people can learn, because I think it’s the counter to the destructive and divisive nature that characterizes the modern discourse, especially in societies where politics are very divided or opinions are very conflicting, whether it’s about race, gender, religion… almost like there’s some kind of dividing line, when in fact life is what happens in the middle, in the grey between the two poles. And it’s there that I like to aim the lens.
LETTERS FROM DRANCY is a work directed by Darren Emerson and produced by All Seeing Eye and East City Films. It will debut at Illinois Holocaust Museum on October 1, 2023, and is currently on its way to LFF Expanded, from October 6 to 22.
Find out more about the piece at the official website and take a look behind the scenes to learn more about Marion Deichmann’s story.
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