2022 Filmmaker In Residence
MY UNDERGROUND MOTHER is a documentary feature about the filmmaker’s search for understanding about her late mother Tamar, a fiery redhead and self-proclaimed hero of the Israeli underground, who kept her childhood in Poland a secret. “I was never a Holocaust victim,” she told her only daughter. Twenty years after her death, Fox stumbles on a family secret and realizes her mother had a hidden identity. What follows is a trail of clues to a ghost factory in the Czech Republic: the site of Gabersdorf, a Nazi-run women’s camp. A hidden diary bearing her and sixty inmates’ writing helps Fox unlock her secret past. In an intergenerational reclaiming of a lost women’s history, MY UNDERGROUND MOTHER challenges Holocaust tropes and explores issues afflicting women today. What is a woman’s worth? What is the price of survival and silence? How can we reconcile with the invisible scars of our mothers?
Meg Moritz is a journalist, writer, and filmmaker based in Boulder, CO. She worked for NBC Radio and TV before becoming a journalism professor at the University of Colorado where her research focused on LGBTQ+ rights as well as media reporting on collective trauma, including school shootings, natural disasters, and terror attacks. She has written and/or directed more than a dozen documentary films, including Scouts Honor (writer), Covering Columbine, Taking the Lede, and Como Fue: A Cuban Journey that have screened on both PBS and at international film festivals. She has served as a Gannett Fellow in Asian Studies, a RIAS Berlin Fellow, a Fulbright Senior Scholar, and a UNESCO chair.
Project description and bios courtesy of the Resident