Oral/Visual Storytelling

Viewers see each painting being made, interwoven with interviews about Kalman. The artist’s mother, Kalman’s surviving sister, tells of their attempt to escape from the Warsaw ghetto and of the last time she saw her brother. The artist speaks about her lifelong desire to find this lost uncle, and about what goes through her mind as she paints him.

The screens periodically show a single painting at a moment when it comes together or falls apart. Thus, two stories are told simultaneously. One is a narrative of loss and memory, the tale of Kalman. The other is a visual story of how a painting goes through a series of destructions before it is ultimately synthesized into a work of art, showing the fragmentation and integration of memory and the creative process.