The Silenced Walls - A film by Sabrina Van Tassel
In the suburb of Drancy lies an unadorned block of low-income housing. On the surface everything seems normal enough, children improvise games beneath its stark façade. But what do the residents know of the site’s dark history? What would they say if they knew their home was haunted - by 80,000 ghosts?
This documentary explores the building that in 1940 became the central internment camp for Jews during the Nazi occupation of France.
Nearly every Jew arrested in France came through its austere lodgings, most on their way to the death camps of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. Known to Jews as the "antechamber of death", it remains the most notorious Holocaust site in all of France, at once damned and sacred.
But what does all this mean to the people who live there now? Is it possible to find happiness between the selfsame walls that have born witness to such misery?
Documentaire, France, 90 mn, J2F Productions, 2014, avec le soutien de la Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah.
Sélectionné au Festival du film français de Los Angeles 2015
Sortie en salle : mercredi 13 mai 2015
DVD et Vidéo à la demande
Documentaire disponible en ligne sur les plateformes iTunes, Google Play, Microsoft et Spicee