Melissa Hacker in conversation with Esther Dischereit, hosted by Dr Ernest Schonfield and film screening
Join us for a film screening of the documentaries My Knees Were Jumping - Remembering the Kindertransports and 256,000 Miles From Home by Melissa Hacker. Followed by a discussion with Melissa Hacker and Esther Dischereit, hosted by Dr Ernest Schonfield.
In the nine months just prior to World War II nearly 10,000 children were sent, without their parents, to Great Britain from Nazi Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland. These children were rescued by the Kindertransport movement. Most of the children never saw their parents again as they soon after boarded trains taking them to concentration camps.
My Knees Were Jumping - Remembering the Kindertransports
One of the children that were rescued by a Kindertransport was Melissa Hacker’s mother, who fled from Vienna and eventually settled in the United States, where she became an Academy Award nominated costume designer, working on films such
Taxi Driver,
Annie Hall,
The Hustler,
The Miracle Worker,
Tootsie, and many more classic American movies. She is a strong presence of the film talking about her experiences alongside other former child refugees, many of them women. They remember the antisemitism of schoolmates and neighbours, the violence and their fears of the Kristallnacht, the difficult decision their parents had to make to send them off into the unknown, and how they were received in England by foster families. Hacker gives them plenty of space to talk and reflect on past events making this film a moving and invaluable record of testimony.
USA 1996, 76 mins.
Direced, Produced and Edited by Melissa Hacker. Narrated by Joan Woodward. With Eddie Better, Sonnie Better, Erika Estis, Kurt Fuchel, Margarete Goldberger, Anni Goodman, Ralph Goodman, Franzi Groszmann, Ruth Morley, Lore Segal, Norbert Wollheim.
256,000 Miles From Home
In
My Knees Were Jumping, Melissa Hacker focused on giving a voice to former Kindertransport refugees and recording the memories of their experiences. In her new short film, released this year, she follows four former unaccompanied child refugees, now ages 83-91, on a trip to Vienna. Arriving there on 1 July 2019, they start a trip retracing the journey they took 80 years ago, alone, leaving their parents, homes, and everything they knew behind.
USA 2023, 15 mins.
Directed and Edited by Melissa Hacker. With Mark Burin, Ilse Melamid, Ralph Mollerick, Eva Yachnes.
Camera John Foster, Composer Karen Goldfeder
About Melissa Hacker
Melissa Hacker is a film and video maker who made her directing debut with the documentary film
My Knees Were Jumping - Remembering the Kindertransports, which was short-listed for Academy Award nomination and was one of only 18 documentaries selected for the Sundance Film Festival Grand Jury Competition.
My Knees Were Jumping has been screened in film festivals, museums, and universities worldwide, and was released theatrically in New York City and aired on television in the United States, Canada, Great Britain and Israel. Melissa has received a Fulbright Artist-in-Residence award in Vienna, and prestigious artist residencies at Yaddo, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Millay, Playa, Willapa Bay AIR, Escape to Create, Saltonstall and Digital Arts Studios, Belfast, Northern Ireland.
Melissa Hacker's work as a freelance film editor has been recognized with two Academy Award nominations for
Sister Rose's Passion and
The Collector of Bedford Street, and two BAFTA nominations for
The Endurance: Shackleton's Legendary Antarctic Expedition.
Beyond Conviction, a feature documentary on restorative justice won the Audience Award at the Woodstock Film Festival, aired on MSNBC and was featured on the Oprah Winfrey Show. Hacker is also a wandering professor, at New York University Film School in New York and Havana, Cuba, Hunter College, City College, and most recently at Marymount Manhattan College and Yangon Film School in Myanmar. Melissa is Executive Director of the Kindertransport Association (KTA) a not-for-profit organization based in the United States. Melissa Hacker holds an MFA from Hunter College CUNY’s Integrated Media Arts Program and a BFA from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts Kanbar Institute of Film and Television.
About Esther Dischereit
Esther Dischereit was born in Heppenheim in 1952 and now lives in Berlin and Vienna. She has been active as a journalist since 1985 and has worked with musicians such as Johannes Niebergall, Bülent Ates, Ray Kaczynski, Friedemann Graef, Rajeh Mehta and Rüdiger Carl since 1988. Since 1993, Dischereit has travelled to Goethe Institutes and universities in the USA, Canada, Medellín/Colombia and various European countries on lecture and reading tours. She is a storyteller, poet, essayist and author of numerous radio and theatre plays and is perhaps the most important German-Jewish author of the post-Shoah generation. From 2012 to 2017, she taught as a professor at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna.
Source: Publisher / vlb
The films will also be available for
online screening on Goethe on Demand in January/Febuary 2024.
In addition to this event there will also be the opportunity to view original archive material relating to Kindertransport children who came to Scotland, from the collections of the Scottish Jewish Archives Centre on 31 January at the Scottish Jewish Archives Centre in Glasgow.
Attendees can also view the exhibition ‘Scotland a Sanctuary’, which looks at the stories of some of the refugees who arrived in Scotland in the 1930s and 1940s. Also available are iPads with thousands of digitised items from the archive collection that relate to the Holocaust period.
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