Filmmaker

Jessica H Kalwill, 49 years old, Argentina

I have a degree in Social Communication (University of Buenos Aires), incomplete postgraduate studies in Sociology of culture, film studies, photography and dance. With 25 years of work in research and documentation of social issues, I have oriented my training and project development to the Essay and Documentary of Audiovisual Creation. I am currently working on two projects around the recovery and enhancement of “silent and silenced voices” in the intergenerational dialogue.

Las Helenas, my first Creative Documentary, is in the development stage and was awarded a grant from the Fondo Nacional de las Artes of Argentina. It is a film based on the encounter with the adolescent diary of my grandmother Hélène, written between 1937 and 1941 escaping from Nazism. From Belgium-Antwerp to Buenos Aires, passing through France, Portugal and Montevideo. An intimate story in the context of a world war, with the drift of writing and forced migration. The two granddaughters who inherited her name, in a ritual of translation that happens somehow out of time and beyond language, we are unveiling the meaning of this finding: its ability to illuminate something of the personal and the contemporary; what it has of its own and universal.