Sylvie Bianchi is, ostensibly, a fairly ordinary woman. She lives in Belgium, in a nice, ordinary countryside home with a nice, ordinary husband. They wear ordinary clothes and eat ordinary food. Sylvie’s grandmother, Nelly Mousset-Vos was also, ostensibly, a fairly ordinary woman – even the ordeal she survived as a young woman was, in this part of Europe in the 1940s, certainly not out of the ordinary. She was arrested by Nazis for supposed espionage and interned in Ravensbrück concentration camp for a year before it was liberated.
Magnus Gertten is, also, a fairly ordinary man. A Swedish documentary filmmaker, around Sylvie’s age, he has enjoyed some success in his career to date, with films entered into the Berlin, CPH:DOX and Edinburgh film festivals, though he has yet to achieve substantial worldwide renown. In 2015, he made a documentary, Every Face Has a Name, in which he uncovered the stories of the people on one short reel of film, shot as the freed prisoners of Nazi camps arrived by boat in Gertten’s hometown of Malmö, Sweden, in April 1945. Their stories are profound yet still, in this part of Europe in this time period, also not out of the ordinary.
One of the people who appears on the reel is Nadine Hwang. An inscrutable figure, her countenance seems apprehensive, ambiguous, neither happy nor sad nor angry, somewhat weary yet somewhat resolved too, hardened and determined. The daughter of a Chinese ambassador to Spain, the Nazis had arrested her for helping people escape France to Spain. She, too, had been interned in Ravensbrück. Gertten couldn’t find much extraordinary about her story beyond her humanitarian deeds during the war. But Bianchi could.
What happened next, after Bianchi had seen Every Face Has a Name and contacted Gertten, was again not out of the ordinary. And yet it has produced one of the most profound, tender movies of the year, Nelly & Nadine, a beautiful excavation of a relationship that endured the unimaginable and is here rendered unforgettable. Bianchi had an old wooden trunk belonging to her grandmother, who seldom spoke of her internment and moved to Venezuela shortly after World War II ended. She moved to Venezuela with one Nadine Hwang and they lived together until Nadine’s death in 1972. Bianchi had never opened the trunk until now, with Gertten’s camera documenting the process. He hoped to find another ordinary yet profound story about the wartime experiences of two fairly ordinary women. She hoped to understand more about her grandmother, a beloved but mysterious figure in her young life. Together, these two find evidence of a deep, powerful romantic love, forged in the shadow of the most unspeakable cruelty, torn apart by circumstances bigger even than it, consolidated over decades of remarkable devotion, now immortalized in this sensitive, compassionate, beautifully made documentary.
Crucially, neither Bianchi nor Gertten seek to assume anything about either Nelly or Nadine; even as they trawl through pictures and home videos of the pair, filmed during their years living as a couple in Caracas, they go by only what they can observe and what Bianchi can recall in reaching conclusions about either woman and their relationship. They meet and interview people who knew them, both in Venezuela and in Ravensbrück. We hear of their influence on others, the people they knew and even their offspring, their ordinary yet generous, meaningful deeds having repercussions over the many decades since. And we learn, through diary entries written by Nelly, letters and the aforementioned footage and photographs of the ordinary yet consummate, immeasurable love they first felt for one another upon meeting in Ravensbrück and never thereafter let slip. It’s in the way their hands briefly, familiarly, tenderly graze one another’s in the home videos, the way their friends and acquaintances speak so reverently about them, the sense of loss conveyed in Nelly’s diary entries following Nadine’s death.
Gertten films this experience, following Bianchi through a reconstructed tour of her grandmother’s adult life, with grace and simplicity. The movie is shot and scored handsomely, accenting and augmenting its emotional currents when appropriate, then receding into the background when it’s more appropriate to let the story speak for itself. There are, of course, unfathomable more stories to tell and truths to uncover, if they are even uncoverable, about the lives of these two women and Nelly & Nadine doesn’t attempt to tell those stories. It tackles the stories it can tell and focuses on communicating the truths within those stories with sincerity and conviction. An ordinary woman saw an ordinary face in a film by an ordinary man and, when they met, they ended up making one of 2022’s most extraordinary features.
Photo courtesy of Wolfe Releasing
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