ABOUT THE FILM
* The film is told as if the images were taken directly from Leo and his grandpa’s Super 8 camera during the ’90s.
* The film was shot on Super-8, during five days, at four different locations, as the graduation film project of the FAAP University. The Production Budget was approximately U$S 3.000. The completion in HD cam was made in the U.S. and added more than U$S 3.000. to the final budget of the film, which were obtained after selection to the Berlin Film Festival.
* The only actor of Jewish origin is the young Sidney Szaja Barmak, chosen among the students of the Hebrew Brazilian Renaissance School, in the neighborhood of Higienópolis in Sao Paulo. The extras belong all to that school.
* Before filming, the script had a dramatic reading performed by the theater group “Golden Age”, composed by elderly members of the Jewish Hebrew Club in Sao Paulo. The ladies of the group were very offended by the story: “We’re not like this”, they complained.
* The film was not written as a comedy, despite the subtle humor. However, at all the shows in Brazil, the audience laughed a lot. Same reaction happenned in most places around the world where the film was shown.
* At the Berlinale 2010, the film was shown as a film for children aged 10 to 14 years old, it was wired and no other childrens film festival selected it fot its program. In St. Petersburg Film Festival and in São Paulo Short film Festival, the film was considered as experimental short film. In Chicago International Film Festival, it won a Golden Plaque for Best Narrative Feature Film, In Cariri, a small town in the country side of the North East of Brasil, the film won the audiance award…
* The film was based on the childhood of the director, who lived in Israel and visited his grandparents every year in Uruguay. Michael’s mother, who usually likes the work of her son, didn’t like the portrait done by him. “My mother was not like that” she criticized.
* The paternal grandmother of the director died in 2007, aged 98. When she was young, she studied at the University of Berlin, but had to leave the country in 1937 because of the Nazi regime. She never went back to live in Germany, despite her nostalgia: “You don’t go back to where you were expelled from.” she explained. For Michael, the premiere of the film at the Berlin Film Festival has a great symbolic importance: “It’s like closing a circle, it’s as if my grandparents were coming back to Berlin.” he says. His maternal grandparents, born in Hungary, could not escape before the war. They were survivors of the concentration camps and died in Uruguay in the late 90´s.
