Nelly & Nadine

At the end of World War II, a boatload of women survivors of Nazi concentration camps debarked in Malmo, Sweden, to begin new lives. Someone filmed this, and this is director Magnus Gerten third movie tracking down the stories of the women shown in that bit of film.

This one is an amazing and touching transcontinental Lesbian love story, spanning prewar literary salons, World War II resistance, survival in the concentration camps, separation, reunification, and a new life in South America.

Note to screenwriters: this would make a hell of a good fiction film, when you aren't constrained by what pictures happened to survive....

Nelly & Nadine (2022) is a documentary film co-written and directed by Magnus Gertten. After the German defeat, a boatload of women who had survived the concentration camps were brought to Sweden. Someone filmed the event, and director Gertten has previously identified two people in the film and made movies about them. This is the third movie, and it involves two women--Nelly Mousset Vos and Nadine Hwang.

The two women met and fell in love in Ravensbrück concentration camp. They were separated, but both survived. Years later, Nelly's granddaughter contacted director Gertten, who made this meticulous documentary about a lesbian couple who traveled all over the world in order to be together.

Nelly & Nadine has a good IMDb rating of 7.3. I thought it was an outstanding movie, and rated it 10. We saw this film as part of Rochester's great ImageOut, the LGBTQ Film Festival.

I watched it and it left me with a lot of questions. To many...

It felt they didn't share all what was inside grandma's box... Instead we get to see this granddaugter who wasn't even curious enough to look inside this box for more then 20 years; when she got the box from her mother. This story is about two brave women and we start with seeing the opposite, the scared granddaughter.

I missed the simple details about the grandmother. Who was this woman before the Nelly & Nadine Story started? Where was Nadine burried?

Instead we get to see the same 8mm homemovies over and over again and this creates this image of two older women in your head. And when seeing that one photo again, the one with a younger Nadine wearing thick glasses, or the video of Nadine arriving in Sweden you get confused.

It lacks certain details... crucial details that can be found with a little research.

Magnus Gertten's 2022 documentary 'Nelly & Nadine', the classic love story of 2 survivors of the Nazi concentration camps of WWII, is also a film about film-making. Gertten patiently constructs a fragmented narrative to reflect his main subject's trepidation. Sylvie Bianchi is the granddaughter of Nelly Mousset-Vos, a Belgian opera singer who fell in love with a mysterious Chinese national Nadine Hwang when they met over a rendition of Puccini's 'Madame Butterfly' on Christmas Eve 1944 at Ravensbrück. In 'Nelly & Nadine', this farmer's wife in idyllic Northern France embarks on a personal journey in relation to this remarkable couple.

It reminds me of another recent film, 2022's 'Three Minutes: A Lengthening'. Bianca Stigter's forensic examination of old cine film of a Polish village immediately before the Holocaust (based on the book 'Three Minutes In Poland' by musician Glenn Kurtz published in 2014) uses the moving images of people and place as a research tool for examining bite-sized pieces of erased history. 'Nadine & Nelly' starts with the archive of women refugees liberated by the Red Cross disembarking at Malmö, Sweden, on 28th April 1945, Gertten (who has made two other films about women shown in these pictures, 'Harbour of Hope' (2021) and 'Every Face Has a Name' (2015)) lets the camera hover over Nadine Hwang's intriguingly long gaze. What is she thinking? How did she get here? And we're off ...

It's fair to say there are bumps in the road. Sylvie's grandmother left behind a mysterious Pandora's box of documents. By presenting 'pieces' of a story , the film raises as many questions as it answers. Gradually, a little frustratingly at times, it sets out to answer them, so I did eventually find out what I wanted to know. Probably history will take care of the rest, but for the purposes of this film 'Nelly & Nadine' is a beautiful story that affected me very deeply.

A couple of noteworthy things. Reels of Super 8 film are very illuminating, mostly shot by Nadine during the couple's life in Caracas after the war, adding 'colour' and intimacy which a still photo would struggle to convey. There is also powerful prose and poetic verse, entries from Nelly's diary manuscripts which the couple worked on together after the war with a view to publishing (rejected, strangely, possibly because of the nature of their relationship and social taboos of the time). Pure horror is Nelly's account of the couple's first separation "At the top, crowning the mountain, lies the camp, Mauthausen, the antechamber of hell", the 5 days and nights of the train journey described in harrowing detail along with the still image of the infamous 186-step 'Staircase Of Death' carved out of stone up which quarry workers were forced to carry huge slabs of stone until they dropped dead.

The film contains many other aspects, not least highlighting the journey of discovery Sylvie goes on, but 'Nelly & Nadine' comes good by the end, so it's well worth watching Gertten & Co.'s account of this remarkable couple's life. British viewers can watch on BBC iPlayer as part of the 'Storyville' collection of award-winning documentaries.

I was already interested when I first heard about this documentary feature, but as someone who primarily watched fiction and especielly so on the theater, I gave it a pass for the time being.

When I heard it was nominated for the Swedish equailent of the Oscar, 'Guldbagge', my interest peaked once more, and I was able to catch it on TV.

For what it is, and as simply told it is, it's a very beautiful documentary. It's shot and edited very well and tells a very emotional and incredible love story, that was very interesting to be sure.

Overall, I would recommend it if you're looking for an interesting documentary. In that area, it's very incredible indeed!