Can pain be inherited? That is the surprising question raised by this documentary. As it turns out, yes. In recent years science and psychoanalysis have pointed out that traces of pains suffered by our ancestors can be deposited in the minds and bodies of us humans, and yet shake our lives: this condition is called intergenerational trauma. This is what I discovered three years ago, when a fire in Turin caused me to have a violent panic attack. Thanks to work with my therapist, I accepted as evidence that those flames awakened in me an impossible memory: the burning of the Beuthen (now Bytom) synagogue by the Nazis on the infamous “Night of Broken Glass”. It is plausible that my maternal grandmother witnessed it and, through my mother, passed the trauma on to me, but for confirmation I have no other way but to investigate, by crossing Calabria, where I grew up, Poland, where I was born, and the memory of my family, shrouded in tenacious silence.
I love writing stories. It was not in my planning to direct a documentary, but the diagnosis of intergenerational trauma changed my life in so many ways, prompting me, among other things, to take this step. With this film I set myself two goals: the first is to tell the personal, intimate and warm story of a pain that crosses three generations, languages and cultures; the second is to investigate an increasingly debated phenomenon: it is the subject of bestsellers like “Emotional Inheritance” (Galit Atlas), and it’s also the concept behind blockbusters like “Everything Everywhere All at Once” or “Encanto”, but for the general public its dynamics are still a mystery. The way this story is told mixes fiction and non-fiction, and has the of a long letter to my daughter, because the point of this research is precisely to unveil the secrets that my family has been carrying for three generations, so that the fourth - my daughter's - will not receive the pain we have experienced.
Robert Sowa (Animazione)