Home Movie

PW: goodfilm2020

This intimate family story is told through 8mm and 16mm home movies, found during a recent house move after being stored in a wardrobe for over 50 years. Through the voice of one of the children featured, film-maker Caroline Pick, now over 70 years old, the film shows an idyllic picture of middle class life from Czechoslovakia in the 1930s to Cardiff in the 1950s. But gradually the footage hints at something unspoken: snatches of tales of those left behind, of silence about the past, of absences unexplained, of non-existent family members.

The intriguing juxtaposition of happy images and an increasingly uneasy undercurrent lead to a moving conclusion. This film is a story of immigration, of dislocation, of incorrect identities and of secrets. 18 close family members dead… and never mentioned.

Caroline Pick’s Home Movie 2013 about her family’s ruptures and silences was shown to great acclaim at international film festivals around the world, but it ended with a question. Her new film, Home Movie 2020, answers it. Incorporating the earlier footage, it moves into the present when Caroline finally plucks up the courage to travel to her mother’s home town in Hungary – more than 80 years after her mother left it – and discovers the heritage that she’d been searching for much of her life.

Home Movie 2020 is a moving film about finding your family, long after they’ve died.

Home Movie has been selected for and shown to great acclaim in over 20 international and national film festivals: London, Brighton, Edinburgh, Berlin, Toronto, Moscow, Jerusalem, San Francisco, New York.