The Ties That Bind

 The Ties That Bind is a film by Su Friedrich in which she interviews her mother about her experiences growing up in Nazi Germany and during WWII. Her mother recounts how she was not allowed to go to the university and was taken from her home and forced to work by the Nazis because she did not join the youth group. She also had experiences of Allied bombing campaigns, and of having her house trashed by the occupying American forces after the surrender. The mother's voice-over narration accompanies archival footage of Germany along with footage of the director's own experiences with protest and documentation of pro-Nazi groups in the U.S. in the mid-eighties. The images of her mother are not conventional documentary close-ups of her face but rather glimpses of her feet, her arms, her shoulders, sometimes her whole body as she spends time in the water at a beach on a lake. Friedrich's questions to her mother are not heard but are scratched words on the film itself.