Born out of a personal exploration of family history, Kam Di Lept is a multimedia project in which I use my relationship with my late grandfather as a means to speak about collective memory, Jewish generational trauma, identity, and loss.
The inception of the project began when I discovered an audio recording of my grandfather speaking about his time as a soldier during World War II - specifically his experience liberating the concentration camp Bergen Belsen. I became interested in tracing back the narrative arc of his life - centered around the idea that he had planned to become an engineer while in the army but decided to become a psychologist after witnessing what he did during the war. I was struck by the idea that this traumatic event he experienced had a ripple effect in two oppositional but connected ways: that future generations of my family could have inherited this trauma but also that his decision to become a therapist created a familial culture that encouraged healing.
The 10 minute film is centered around my family home on Fire Island, which the project takes its title from - a Yiddish phrase which translates to ‘we finally lived to see it.’ That house provides a physical and visual space for me to explore what it meant to be descended from generations of Jewish family who faced persecution and trauma. The project combines a variety of media including super-8 footage shot by my grandfather, home videos, archival family photos, documentary footage of the liberation of Bergen Belsen, photos from my own personal archive, and audio recordings of myself, my mother, my grandmother, and my grandfather. It is anchored by my voice-over which traces the non-linear narrative of my exploration of the absence of my grandfather and the difficulty of understanding my own identity when pieces of my history were a mystery to me.
Ultimately, the work is about the process of searching - for self, for identity, for understanding; in the hopes that exploring inherited trauma and grief can give us the power to break silences and heal wounds so as to not pass them on.