Kundura Sinema’s Love, Rebellion, Freedom documentary film selection features “Nelly & Nadine”, which follows the moving journey of two women in pursuit of a ‘forbidden love’ that began in a concentration camp in the 1940s. The film’s director Magnus Gertten spoke about how the film came to be and its challenging production process.

How did the story of Nelly & Nadine begin?

It actually goes back to 2007. That was the year I began researching a historical event in Malmö, which is also the city where I was born. At the end of World War II, around 15,000 people rescued from the Nazi concentration camps in Germany found refuge in Sweden for several months. The survivors took their first steps of freedom in the harbor of Malmö. April 28, 1945, in particular, was one of the days carefully documented by the Swedish media. The best film photographers were there to capture striking close-ups of people who had just escaped the horrors of the camps. The archival footage shot in Malmö was about 40 minutes long and was unique material of its kind. The faces in the films—these newly liberated people standing in the harbor of the city where I was born—fascinated me. I asked myself: would it be possible to identify these people, almost 70 years later?

And so began a long cinematic journey, one that produced two different documentaries: “Harbour of Hope” (2011) tells the big story of how the Swedish city looked upon the survivors in 1945, while “Every Face Has a Name” (2015) took on the conceptual mission of finding the names behind the anonymous faces. I can proudly say that both films traveled the world and won awards.

Whom did you identify in the footage from April 28, 1945?

The people in the archival footage came from different backgrounds; among them were Jews, members of the Belgian resistance, British agents, Norwegian resistance fighters and Polish women with newborn babies. We managed to trace the stories of many of the survivors.

One of the most mysterious people in the harbor footage was a Chinese woman in a striped camp uniform, standing in front of a wooden fence. While the others were clearly happy, she had a very serious expression on her face. While editing our two documentaries, we kept returning to the footage of this striking woman. What was she thinking at that moment? What became of her story after the war?

How did you learn the story of Nelly and Nadine?

First, we learned the name of that mysterious woman—Nadine Hwang—and a year after completing “Every Face Has a Name,” we returned to her story to discover what had happened to her after the war. A Venezuelan woman living in Paris saw the call for help we had posted on social media and wrote to us. She told us that Nadine Hwang had been her nanny in Caracas, Venezuela, when she was a baby in the late ’60s.

The last missing pieces about Nadine came to light in late 2016, when I attended a screening of “Every Face Has a Name” in Paris. There I met a couple named Sylvie and Christian. They told me the whole story of the relationship between Nadine Hwang and the Belgian singer Nelly Mousset-Vos, Sylvie’s grandmother, and spoke of the archival treasures in their attic, among them a diary from the camp years. Suddenly, I had another big story in my hands connected to the 1945 archival footage. I had never dreamed of making another film from this archive, but it was clear that I had to take care of this gift.

Is there anything you would like to add?

“Nelly & Nadine” gave me the chance to combine my curiosity about history and music with my passion for telling the stories of people who fight for freedom, love and the right to be themselves. And once again I realized that I have the most privileged job in the world.

For ticket information for “Nelly & Nadine,” screening on June 4 as part of “Love, Rebellion, Freedom,” please follow this link.

Magnus Gertten: An award-winning director and producer based in Malmö, Sweden. During his years as a TV and radio journalist, he made films for Swedish National Radio and Swedish Television (SVT). He continues to develop projects under Auto Images, the production company he founded with actor Lennart Ström. His notable films include “Get Busy” (2004); “Rolling Like a Stone” (2005), which won the Best Music Documentary Award at the Silverdocs/AFI Festival; “Long Distance Love,” which won the Best Documentary Award at the Hamptons Film Festival in 2009; “Harbour of Hope” (2012), which received the Special Jury Award at the Krakow Film Festival; “Every Face Has a Name” (2014), screened in the Best of Fests section at IDFA 2015; and “Becoming Zlatan” (2015), which he co-directed with his brother Fredrik Gertten. Since 2017, he has held an honorary doctorate from Malmö University.