In this essential film, nourished by many unpublished documents, director David Teboul again evokes the deportation of parents and children in 1944, passage “on the other side of the human”.
It has been almost twenty years since David Teboul met Simone Veil for the first time (1927-2017). Fascinated by her since her childhood, he wanted to devote a film to her; She didn’t want to hear anything. He told her about his bun and they became close-as the director told a tribune in the world, in 2017.
was born from this meeting Simone Veil, a French story (2004), a film as poignant as alive where we see Simone and Marceline (Loridan-Itens), the “girls of Birkenau”, discuss lying on a bed , where we also hear Denise Vernay, one of the three Jacob sisters. The third, Madeleine Jampolsky, called “Milou”, will also repeat death camps but died in a car accident in 1952.
David Teboul returns to the history of the Jacob family, loving and united, including the tranquility of life in Nice, “with its light, its indolence, the sea baths in summer and the smells of Mimosa”, remembered Simone Veil, is brutally interrupted by war, arrest by Gestapo and sending to death camps. Neither the mother, Yvonne, nor the father, André, nor the fourth child, Jean, will come back.
This new very beautiful film of some ninety minutes takes up images of Simone Veil, a French story, broadcast on France 5 in 2005. In particular those of the trip that Simone Veil had made, for the director of the director, In the death camps (she was, with her mother and Milou, deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau, then Dora and Bergen-Belsen; Denise was sent to Ravensbrück).
rushs accumulated
But many of these color images, which contrast with the rest of the archive documents in black and white – public or private, rare or unpublished too -, result from the rushes accumulated for this film and are therefore for the first once used, as David Teboul confirmed to us.
So that Simone Veil and her sisters prolongs Simone Veil, a French story by bringing her another unprecedented windfall: the stories, correspondence, newspapers and articles written by the three daughters and their darling mother, whose chilling testimony of Milou over the last hours of his mother. Everything is read by Isabelle Huppert, Dominique Reymond, Céleste Brunnquell, Emmanuelle Devos and Mathieu Amalric.
as David Teboul says, in the preface to the almost homonymous book, Simone and his sisters, which appears Thursday October 13 at Les Arenès editions (256 pages, 22.80 euros) and which publishes these texts for the first time Heard in the film: “Milou, on the return from deportation, had written what [Simone] was no longer able to tell me.”
These words, like all that we hear and sees in the film, are of brutality calm. As Simone Veil reports with the painful dignity that was hers: “we come back from another world”, we have passed “on the other side of the human”.
