Hot Docs: Inside Hana's Suitcase
The Jewish Holocaust is a vast subject, and filmmaker Larry Weinstein wasn’t sure he wanted to explore it. The award-winning filmmaker admits that
he had “never been to a camp before” and that he “wanted to avoid” the topic. Approached by writer Thomas Wallman about the story of Hanna Brady, however, and things changed.
Inside Hana’s Suitcase, running as part of this year’s Hot Docs film festival, tells the poignant story of the little Czech girl, and how her suitcase, and the story behind it, has affected a Japanese school teacher, a brother who survived the Holocaust, and millions of school children around the world. The film blends the three threads of Hana’s short life, her brother George’s memories (and current life), and Japanese teacher Fumiko Ishioka’s experiences together. Weinstein uses recreations of both the suitcase’s arrival in Japan as well as the Brady family’s life before and during the second World War. Canadian, Czech and Japanese schoolchildren are used as narrators of the story. Much of their dialogue is taken from journalist Karen Levine’s book Hannah’s Suitcase. Levine originally wrote it after producing an award-winning radio piece for CBC; it became a worldwide hit and is in its 24th printing. The story was translated onto the stage and acclaimed journalist Joe Schlesinger did a special on it as well.
Weinstein’s films (and his company, Rhombus Media), have tended to focus on arts-centric themes: September Songs (about Kurt Weill), Beethoven’s Hair and Ravel’s Brain are a few of the titles Weinstein has been involved with over the years. Each has a unique mix –what Weinstein terms a “hybrid” –of documentary and drama, and he found this style reflected in Levine’s book too, so it seemed appropriate to use both to present the story of Hanna Brady, and her life before and during the Holocaust. Since he’d worked on films in which music played such a central theme in the past, he also wanted to make sure the same held true for Inside Hana’s Suitcase. The music in the film is a mix of old and new. Much of the score was comprised of work composed by three musicians, all of whom were interred at Terezin (the Czech Republic’s concentration camp) and later died in Auschwitz. There is also a piece by Czech composer Martinu, and one by Karl Amadeus Hartman, who was the only anti-Hitler composer who lived and worked in Hitler’s Germany. Weinstein says he wanted to use the work of these composers, alongside the contemporarily-scored stuff.
“It was intentional,” he says. “I thought it would be appropriate.”
Art and culture take on another role in the film, with the drawings of Hanna used alongside that of other children who were interred at Terezin. Weinstein even added animation to one of the deceased’s girls drawings. “One of my first ideas before even the writing was, I wanted her drawings to come to life. I wanted to give the sense that once (teacher Ishioka) came to Terezin, she would feel Hanna’s spirit through those drawings coming to life.” The teacher in Terezin, a Czech artist who held classes in secret, helped her students to remember what their lives used to be like, using art as a kind of panacea for their present reality. “She encouraged them to draw things of their happier life,” he explains, “of the life they were looking forward to. She didn’t want them to dwell on grim reality –some did, but most of the pictures are happy.”
Perhaps the most emotional moments in the film are related to George Brady, Hanna’s brother, who lives in Toronto, recalling his personal memories of his time with, and then away from his sister. He was the only one of his family to survive the Holocaust. According to Weinstein, friends of Brady’s who saw the film say it was the first time he truly emoted publicly about losing his sister. “Every time is the first time,” Weinstein says about Brady’s sharing his experiences of the Holocaust with others, “and some areas are very emotional.”
What’s perhaps most touching about Inside Hana’s Suitcase is seeing the ways in which the generations relate and come to understandings. “With the kids, what we were finding was that many of them had never met a Jewish person,” says Weinstein,”so the book resonated with them. A lot of kids were touched by abuse in their own homes or bullying or a lot of discrimination and racism, or they were in a single parent situation, so aspects of the story resonated with them in profound and moving, heartbreaking ways.”
