Martha

À 90 ans, la frêle Martha Katz a toujours une énergie débordante. Espiègle, elle taquine son petit-fils, le réalisateur Daniel Schubert en visite chez elle à Los Angeles, à propos de la chemise qu'il porte, mais cet humour cache une tragédie. À 14 ans, Martha a été arrachée à son village en Tchécoslovaquie et déportée à Auschwitz avec sa famille. La visite d'un musée de l'Holocauste ravive des souvenirs douloureux, notamment la rencontre angoissante de l'un des personnages les plus tristement célèbres de l'Allemagne nazie. Pour la tenace survivante Martha, toutefois, ce qui compte, c'est sa vie d'après-guerre à Winnipeg, difficile mais gratifiante, qu'elle évoque avec tendresse dans ce portrait intimiste et chaleureux.

Torill Kove's grandmother often told her stories. One in particular revolved around ironing shirts for the King of Norway. And what if that intriguing detail was just the tip of the iceberg? Perhaps she also worked covertly in the Norwegian resistance... Maybe she even spearheaded a campaign to create an unprecedented brand of guerrilla warfare! Treating history as a fabric woven from personal stories, animator Torill Kove follows a thread of family history, embroidering it with playful twists along the way. In My Grandmother Ironed the King's Shirts, she imaginatively renders her grandmother's life and work in Oslo, especially during World War II. Sharp and whimsical, her story combines her grandmother's tales with historical events and fantasy, and shows how a cherished anecdote can come to acquire a mythical status. My Grandmother Ironed the King's Shirts is about an ordinary woman with a revolutionary instinct. With sharp humour it explores storytelling, myth-making and the important contributions that are possible through the most humble means.

For filmmaker Jari Osborne, November 11 was as unremarkable a day as the next. Watching her father, Alex Louie, during his annual Remembrance Day ritual, Osborne always thought of him as sentimental. However, in discovering her father's involvement in World War II, she uncovers a legacy of discrimination and politically sanctioned racism against British Columbia's Chinese-Canadian community. Sworn to secrecy for decades, Osborne's father and his war buddies now vividly recall their top-secret missions behind enemy lines in Southeast Asia. Theirs is a tale of young Chinese-Canadian men proudly fighting for a country that had always mistreated them. Told in the voice of a thankful daughter, this multi-layered documentary does more than reveal an important period in Canadian history. It pays moving tribute to a father's quiet heroism.