Moving German-Israeli family history

 

Director Yael Reuveny searched for clues with her camera

 

The German arts pages are full of praise for Yael Reuveny’s documentary film 
Schnee von gestern. “Deeply moving,” wrote Der Spiegel, and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung called the film “a masterpiece” by the Israeli director who has lived in Berlin since 2005. Yael Reuveny tells her unusual family history between Israel and East Germany: a few years before her death, Yael’s grandmother learnt that the brother she thought had died in Buchenwald concentration camp had in fact survived. But she wanted nothing to do with the brother in the land of the perpetrators. Yael Reuveny set out to meet the German part of her family, got to know a young 
relative who was studying Jewish history and travelled with him to Israel. The film has already received many awards at both German and Israeli festivals.