80 Jahre Kriegsende: "Schwarzer Zucker, rotes Blut"

To commemorate the 80th anniversary of the end of the war, we are showing the new documentary film by Mannheim photographer and filmmaker Luigi Toscano about a woman who survived Auschwitz as a small child; with an introduction by Team Toscano:

BLACK SUGAR, RED BLOOD

DEU 2024. dir: Luigi Toscano. Documentary. 100 min. FSK: 12

The Mannheim photographer and filmmaker Luigi Toscano researches the origins of Anna Strishkowa from Kyiv. She is a small child when she stands on the Auschwitz ramp on December 4, 1943. She does not know her parents' names, nor where she comes from. Toscano met her in 2015 as part of his photo project "Against Forgetting" - over 400 portraits of Holocaust survivors. Since then, the fate of Anna Strishkowa has stayed with him. His search for traces of Anna's origins led him from Auschwitz to the Belarusian village of Pronino, to the Potulice-Lebrechtsdorf camp in Poland, to Kyiv and Drohobych in Ukraine and finally to Unna in North Rhine-Westphalia. "What he discovers in the course of his tenacious research, which is also overshadowed by the outbreak of war in Ukraine, is astonishing and harrowing, and the old lady's reactions are heartbreaking." (Tagesspiegel)

Introduction: Team Toscano