Synopsis
Letters from Chicago is a very personal film portrait of Lore Frank, née Hirsch (*1917), and Gustav Frank (1912-2004), who married and began a new life in Chicago after emigrating to the U.S. in 1939 - but never lost touch with their german roots. Gustav is a passionate amateur photographer. Even as a boy in Ulm, he used to imagine how something would look as a photograph and dream of having a camera of his own some day.His earliest portraits of members of his large extended Jewish family and cityscapes of the "old" Ulm, the city of Albert Einstein, date back to 1925 and were taken with a plate camera.
When he returns to his native Ulm in 1945, it is as an American soldier seeking his parents. His heart almost stops at the sight of the bombed-out windows and ruins of the buildings he once knew so well. He records the destruction in numerous poignant photographs. His quest for his parents, however, is in vain: His entire family has been murdered in the Holocaust.
The film shows photographs from Gustav's boyhood in South Germany and the first pictures taken in his new life in exile.
Images resonant with loss - the loss of his family and the destruction of his native city after the war - and with the hope of a new beginning, in a new world that could hardly be any more different from that of his youth.
The film testifies eloquently to the significance of memory in our lives, and gives us a vivid impression of what it means
to grow old in a country far from that of one's birth - without ever losing your sense of humor.
And in the end, when human memory fails, the memories of what once was are lost forever.
German title: BRIEFE AUS CHICAGO
