Images Between Us

Images Between Us is a personal feature documentary born from the approximately 70,000 negatives left by my father, Antal Wormser, a photojournalist in Hungary from 1950 to 1990. For forty years, he photographed the public and everyday life of a country passing through Stalinism, the 1956 Revolution, “Goulash Communism,” and finally the collapse of the socialist regime.

On the same camera rolls that contain demonstrations, workers, accidents, celebrations and street scenes, another story appears: that of our family. My mother Éva as a young woman, my parents in love, my sister, my birth, our apartment, our vacations. The history of a country and the history of a family were inscribed on the same strips of film.

Both of my parents survived the Holocaust and were orphaned by the war. Yet they went on to build a family, careers, and a passionate life together over sixty-nine years. At the heart of the film are two documentarians looking at one another across time: my father photographed my beginnings; decades later, I turned the camera toward him and my mother, filming them during the final years of their lives. His photographs and my cinéma-vérité footage now form two archives facing one another.

Today, a third generation enters this dialogue. My son Victor, now the same age my father was when he met my mother, joins me with his partner Leia in dreamlike sequences inspired by the archive. Rather than reconstructing the past, they allow gestures, objects and situations from the photographs to acquire a new life in the present.

Moving between documentary photography, cinéma-vérité footage and dreamlike sequences, Images Between Us follows images across three generations — a family and a love story unfolding within history, and a meditation on why we document, what an archive preserves, and how images change after the people in them are gone.

Every year, another batch of my father’s scanned photographs arrives on my computer. Since 2007, the Hungarian National Museum has been digitizing the approximately 70,000 negatives that survive from Antal Wormser’s forty years as a photojournalist. I never quite know what I am going to find.

As a newspaper photographer, my father kept shooting while a situation unfolded, searching for the image that would eventually be selected for publication. Only one might appear in the newspaper that same day, often poorly reproduced, but the negatives preserve everything around it: someone enters the frame, a face turns, a hand moves, an expression changes. Through editing and sound, these sequences of still photographs can recover a sense of duration and become cinema.

The public archive is constantly interrupted by our private one. A political demonstration is followed by my mother smiling into my father’s camera. Factory workers give way to a family vacation. A few frames later, my sister appears, then my birth, our apartment, family meals. The national and intimate histories are inseparable.

For years, part of the archive survived in two garbage bags under a bed at our cottage. Today the negatives are handled with white gloves in a national museum. Their journey — from newspaper assignments, to forgotten bags, to museum shelves, digitization and now a film — is itself part of the story.

The archive also poses a contemporary question. Approximately 70,000 negatives survive from my father’s forty-year career. Today, by some estimates, roughly the same number of photographs are taken around the world every second. What happens to the value of an image when images become almost infinite?

Not long after my parents died, a newly digitized series arrived from the museum. The photographs were taken around 1955 during one of the darkest periods of repression in Hungary. A beautiful, flirtatious seventeen-year-old woman looks into my father’s camera: Éva, my mother. Beside her is a young Antal, long before he became the old man I knew at the end of his life. They travel, laugh, touch and pose for one another. For the first time, I was not looking at my parents. I was looking at two young people in love.

By the time they met, they had already lived through an immense history. Antal was born in Budapest in 1931. His father was taken for forced labour and never returned; his mother was shot into the Danube during the final days of the war. Virtually alone as a teenager, he found his way into photography and became a photojournalist at eighteen.

Éva Weisz was also a Holocaust survivor. Her father disappeared into a labour camp during the war; after losing her mother, she was an orphan by thirteen. At seventeen she met a stylish young photographer and, as she later told me with great humour, decided he would become her husband.

Their childhood worlds had been devastated, yet the life they built together was vivid, ambitious, contradictory and intensely lived. Their sixty-nine-year marriage contained tenderness, humour and deep attachment, but also conflict, jealousy and infidelity. The film does not idealize their relationship. What fascinates me is its durability, complexity and appetite for life.

In the footage of their final years, Éva remains the driving force: talking, organizing, correcting, provoking and caring for Antal. Their relationship is visible in small gestures accumulated over decades. When my father dies, she leans toward him and whispers, “I’ll join you soon.” A few months later, she follows.

In 1999, I bought my first digital video camera to make my documentary films, including Step Up! and Touched by Water. When I wasn’t working on my films, I turned the camera toward my family — my children growing up, visits with their grandparents, conversations, trips to Budapest and Toronto. What began simply as family recordings gradually became an archive of its own. Only during my parents’ final seven years did I begin consciously filming them for this film — listening to their stories, returning with them to photographs and places, and observing their life together as it approached its end.

Two archives now face one another: the photographs my father made as a young man, husband and father, and the moving images I made as his son. Moments separated by decades begin to echo, contradict and transform one another.

With my son Victor, the relationship to the archive changes again. Victor is now the same age Antal was when he met Éva. He knew his grandfather as an old man; through the photographs he encounters Antal in his twenties — young, stylish, in love, with almost his entire adult life ahead of him.

In Montreal and Budapest, Victor wears his grandfather’s suit, winds his watch and handles his camera. His partner Leia, close to Éva’s age in the newly discovered photographs, joins him. They remain entirely themselves. A photograph may suggest a gesture, an object, a location or a situation, but what follows belongs to Victor and Leia. For brief moments, two young couples separated by nearly seventy years seem to overlap before the present takes over again.

Across three generations, the camera changes hands, as photographs become memories, and memories become new images.

Images Between Us will not follow a conventional chronology. Its structure will behave more like memory: one image awakens another; a place returns decades later; a gesture in the present echoes one caught by my father’s camera; a family memory collides with the historical record.

The photographs are not illustrations. They are active material. Sequences of negatives will be shaped through rhythm, sound, archival voices and music. At times the succession of still images may approach movement; at others a single photograph will hold long enough for us to search it. The missing instants between photographs remain visible. I do not want to pretend that these are moving pictures, but to create cinema from the traces of movement they contain.

The film’s different materials carry their own textures and traces of time. My father’s photographs survive as negatives and as prints of different sizes, papers and conditions — their physical texture becoming part of the image itself. My own family archive begins on MiniDV, moves through HDV and HD, and eventually includes phone footage. Rather than trying to make these images look alike, the film embraces their differences. Their grain, resolution, colour and imperfections become part of the passage through time — each period of our lives leaving a different visual trace. Newly filmed cinéma-vérité scenes with my sister Andrea, Victor and the museum allow discovery to happen in the present rather than simply explaining a past we already understand.

Period radio, voices, music and contemporary sound create another layer of memory, sometimes grounding the photographs in their time, sometimes pulling them into the present.

The dreamlike sequences with Victor and Leia move the film beyond what can be known. I cannot ask my parents what happened immediately before or after a photograph made seventy years ago. Imagination enters where testimony ends — not as reconstruction, but as a dialogue with the archive.

A sparse first-person narration guides these layers from inside the story. I am sometimes remembering, sometimes questioning what I remember, and sometimes acknowledging that the answers disappeared with my parents. The film begins with loss, but does not remain in mourning. As the archive opens, the old people in my footage regain their younger faces.