The Intern 575

During the Second World War My great-grandfather Bruno Heilig spent 7 years in a South African internment camp for German people suspected of being Nazis or Nazi sympathizers. The film essay I intend to make as part of my research into personal stories and historical narratives in the context of South Africa, will not explore those 7 years spent in the Andalusia internment camp in Jankempsdorp. The intern number 575 (2016), will instead be presented as a series of flashbacks to 7 key moments in the intern’s life as narrated by the intern’s sons. The story, told by Robert and Franz Heilig, is a subjective and personal account of their father’s life within the context of South Africa in the 1940s. The characters and their contexts are described by my grandfather and therefore bare the marks of his fictions, preconceptions, memory loss and, to a degree, historical amnesia. My question is perhaps more to do with the ability to capture a person’s delusions in a film essay; than to portray a realistic document, although documentary, and in particular space-based documentary footage filmed in specific places. Represented as both real and imaginary/metaphoric (Rascaroli, 2013: 3), the scenes are filmed in particular sites like museums, train stations, beaches both conceptually and formally form part of these delusions.

Year

2017

Director

Megan-Leigh Heilig

Duration

67 min

Country

South Africa

Language

English