The Archives

Synopsis

In our post-truth era, even the irrefutable, documented, eye-witnessed history of the Holocaust is not safe from assault. Antisemitism is on the rise and fascism at large. The Archives follows Olympic skier Avital Carroll, retired therapist and social worker Muki W. Fairchild, Dave de Csepel, the heir to the 19^th century industrialist, steel factory owner, and art collector Manfréd Weiss de Csepel, and others as they desperately search for their familial records and uncover their tumultuous histories of persecution, murder, exile, and survival under the Third Reich. Each of their quests is facilitated by a team of archivists, such as Hubert Steiner, retired Austrian State head archivist, who recorded and indexed Austria’s 55,000 Aryanization records in the 1990s for the Vienna State Archives; or Stefanie Halpern, Director of the YIVO Archives in New York, who works tirelessly to acquire and digitize over 4.1 million original pages of Jewish cultural memory. Our protagonists’ stories parallel and intersect throughout the film, coming together in a harmonious ending underscoring the importance of the archives and all the archival searches. Like solving a million-piece puzzle, the archivists and searchers piece together piles of documents linking searchers to their personal family histories, and ultimately to the collective truth. 

About the Director

Bernadette Wednestein is an Austrian-born linguist, author and critically acclaimed documentary filmmaker living in Baltimore. Her work brings together her feminist thought and interest in human-centric storytelling. Bernadette has produced and directed several award-winning documentary features and shorts, including, Devoti Tutti (2023), a feminist retelling of the myth of Saint Agatha of Catania; The Conductor (2021), the empowering life story of the conductor Marin Alsop, which was nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Arts & Culture Documentary; See You Soon Again and The Good Breast. Her documentary short, See Me: A Global Concert, which was filmed during the pandemic in 2021, won numerous awards including Best Music Film and Best Musical Editing. Bernadette is a professor of media studies at Johns Hopkins University, where she directs the Center for Advanced Media Studies. She is the author of several influential books in the field of feminist media studies with MIT Press

Artist Statement

In The Archives I follow several protagonists as they dig through archives and graveyards in their painstaking searches guided by truth-driven genealogists and archivists preserving Holocaust documents at risk of erasure. I want the viewer to fall for these searchers of historical truth and those who help them not only to find the answers to their quests but who keep the truth alive for all of us. The Archives will give the viewer the sense that the documents and gravestones in question are actually alive.  Stop-motion animations paired with each search will capture the importance of documents such as: Muki Fairchild’s Aryanization records of her family home and great uncle’s sanatorium, Bettina’s hand-drawn family genealogy tree and ancestor’s “moved to Mauthausen” deportation records, Georg’s company books revealing the erasure of his clients in 1938, and Dave’s family’s appropriated, extensive art collection hanging at the Fine Art Museum in Budapest.