The Kann Artists (2011)

Filmmaker Jeff Zimbalist (FAVELA RISING, THE TWO ESCOBARS) revisits personal video diaries and intimate footage he shot while in college of his mother and grandmother... A holocaust survivor loses her grasp on reality after years of fear, hiding, and time in a concentration camp. Her daughter, left to raise herself with no money and a paranoid schizophrenic mother, is destined to become an artist to make sense of her past. The grandson is subsequently raised in a comfortable middle-class upbringing, envying his mother and grandmother's struggle, and eventually directs this short film to make sense of it all. Weaving archival footage, rare interviews, 16mm home films and paintings, THE KANN ARTISTS tells the story of three generations in the Kann family, an evolution and comparison of suffering and survival, privilege and expression.