PAPER BRIDGE

Paper Bridge is a journey through Ruth Beckermann's own family's history and at the same time the story of Central Europe's Jews and of a region. It takes her from Vienna, where her grandmother survived the war and the nazis in hiding and to which her mother returned from Israel, to the landscapes of her father's childhood: the Bukowina, once part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.



16mm – 95’ – color – 1:1,33
optical sound - OV

A film by Ruth Beckermann
Cinematography Nurith Aviv
Sound Josef Aichholzer, Reinhold Kaiser, Heinz Ebner
Editing Gertraud Luschützky
with Betty Beckermann, Salo Beckermann, Herbert Gropper, Robert Schindel, Willi Stern, Rabbi Wassermann, u.v.a.

Premiere 1.3.1987, Internationales Forum des jungen Films, Berlin, Zoo-Atelier
Cinema release 10.4.1987, Stadtkino, Vienna
Festivals Berlin, Hamburg, Troja (Portugal), Edinburgh, Montecatini, New York, Jerusalem, London etc.

No, this is not a documentary film. This is a vital work that elevates the art of film beyond its similarities with poetry, narrative storytelling, and introspection by placing the most subtle means of conveying metaphor and metonymy in the service of the desire to preserve.
Hélène Cixous, 2006

A story such as you won’t find in any library of the world, nor field of study; the kind you are told and raised on by your parents, until the day arrives when you yourself embark on a journey of discovery to seek out the matching images to your own questions.
Goschka Gawlik, Filmlogbuch

Paper Bridge shows the relationship between history and memory, refers to the act (of filming), without sliding back into (the) pornography (of self-adulation), and comments along the way on the events of 1986. The film reveals, for a few minutes at a time, fascism at work.
Alexander Horwath, Falter
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HOW TO FILM BECOMING INVISIBLE
Hélène Cixous, 2006