The KTA is thrilled to announce a special private screening and discussion with the director, artist and KT2 Ella Dreyfus, and her film, Dreyfus Drei, a short film about family, identity, and the return of three generations of Jewish artists from Australia to Germany. This is a rare opportunity to learn about the Kindertransport children sent to Australia, and to hear from a KT3 who has chosen to live in Berlin.
Ella Dreyfus grew up in a vibrant, Jewish home in Sydney, Australia with little knowledge of her family’s tragic losses in the Holocaust. Her father Richard’s silence about his childhood in Wuppertal and Berlin left Ella with a feeling of dread and fear of all things German. It wasn’t until after her father died that Ella began thinking about her family’s hidden history.
In Dreyfus Drei Ella sets out to uncover their history with her uncle George in Melbourne and her cousin Jonathan, a KT3 living in Berlin, and finds her own way of re-connecting to her family’s former lives in Germany. Dreyfus Drei is a poetic film that travels from Australia to Berlin following Ella’s search for the Dreyfus’ histories and traces of her late Kindertransport Survivor father’s existence and creates a family portrait about exile, identity, and art.
Ella Dreyfus has a thirty 30 year career as a contemporary visual artist and over 25 years’ experience in arts education as a lecturer at Australian art institutions and a presenter at international conferences. In 2017 Dreyfus was Artist in Residence at the Bellevue Saal Kunsthaus in Wiesbaden Germany where she created a series of public installations and photographs on the theme of her family’s past as Jews in Nazi Germany.
The film will be available for viewing online July 25- August 3. A link will be sent on July 25 to all who have registered for the discussion.
