In Susanne Kovács’s intimate dive into her family history, memory is a tempestuous mistress. Brittle like glass, the ghosts of the past haunt generations of the Kovács family. Guided by the director’s desire to learn more about her grandmother’s time in the Mauthausen concentration camp – a painful chapter the elderly matriarch refuses to confide in detail – this documentary turns into a historical excavation. Startling revelations reveal how violence can breed violence.
As the camera patiently gazes over a wealth of family photographs, viewers get glimpses of Kovács’s grandmother Eva as a young girl. There are also childhood pictures of Kovács’s father, Peter, a smiling boy nestled between his parents. The contrast between reality and the happiness seen in these closeups is especially wrenching. Soon Eva, the lovely princess of a wealthy Jewish Hungarian family, will be deported to Mauthausen. As for Peter, he endured years of physical and mental abuse from his parents. His father, also a Holocaust survivor, would shout horrible slurs at his child, including calling Peter a fascist.
While Kovács sees this abuse through a compassionate lens, Peter wonders whether his father’s sadism was innate, predating his ordeal in the camp. Still, Kovács also feels a distance from her grandmother. The fact that Kovács’s mother was German with family links to the Nazi regime certainly complicates matters. Resisting the linearity of memory and history, It Takes a Family acknowledges the impossibility of tying up loose ends. To see Kovács cradling her baby near the end of the film is moving: a new being is entering a knotty family history. Kovács’s willingness to confront the past suggests that the wounds of intergenerational trauma can be healed.
• It Takes a Family is available on 8 July on True Story.
