Film screening – Dreyfus Drei

Please join the Melbourne Holocaust Museum, in collaboration with the Goethe-Institut, for a special film-screening event.

When Sydney-based artist and academic Ella Dreyfus set about exploring her late father’s experiences in the Holocaust, she began a journey that would take her back to Berlin and would culminate with the completion of a powerful 30-minute documentary. With the hope that her film will initiate a dialogue for subsequent generations to confront their own inherited traumas, Dreyfus Drei seeks to penetrate the wall of silence that many survivors erect around their lives.

Combining family interviews in Melbourne and Sydney with visits to the family’s former homes and the construction of public art installations in Germany, the film also features her uncle George Dreyfus’s musical compositions and her cousin Jonathan’s new arrangements. Dreyfus Drei creates a family portrait about exile, identity, and art, and navigates the complex terrain of how three generations from one family each negotiate their own return to the “homeland”.

Dreyfus Drei was written, directed and produced by Ella Dreyfus, co-directed and co-produced by Janis Westphal, Sevenpeaks Films in Berlin, executive production by the Goethe-Institut and commissioned by the German Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media for the 1700 Years of Jewish Life in Germany Festival.

After the screening of Dreyfus Drei, Dr Simon Holloway will be in conversation with the director, Ella Dreyfus, who will also take questions from the audience. Following this conversation, participants will have the opportunity to explore our new museum exhibit: Everybody Had a Name.