Please join us for this screening of the new documentary film My Illegal Life. Writer Esther Dischereit and director Gerhard Schick will be present to introduce and discuss the film.
In 1942, a Jewish mother, Hella Zacharias, and her five-year-old daughter went into hiding in the Berlin underground. Through Hella's own resourcefulness and the help of others, both mother and daughter survived through the war. In My Illegal Life (Germany, 2024, 89 min.), writer Esther Dischereit, Hella’s second-born daughter, follows the traces of her mother's and half-sister's experiences in hiding.
Esther Dischereit grew up in post-war West Germany, the daughter of a mother who survived the Holocaust in hiding and a German father. After German reunification in 1989 she moved to Berlin with her two daughters and became a full-time writer, performer, and teacher. She has held professorships at the University for Applied Arts Vienna; the University of Virginia (Max Kade Distinguished Visiting Professor, 2017); and New York University (2019 DAAD Chair in Contemporary Poetics). Her latest book is Ein Haufen Dollarscheine (“A Bunch of Dollarnotes,” 2024). She curated the exhibition “Who was Fritz Kittel: A Railroadworker of the German Reichsbahn Decides. Two Families, 1933–2021,” which is currently being shown in Germany.
Gerhard Schick, M.A. studied theatre, film and television studies, German philology and history in Cologne and Tel Aviv. Since completing his master’s degree in 1999, he has worked internationally as a writer and director of feature-length documentaries, mainly for public television and cinema. His films have received a number of awards. Since 2016 Gerhard is involved in the development of Virtual and Augmented Reality applications. He is also a passionate teacher who loves to work with students from different disciplines. Gerhard lives in Cologne and Berlin.
This event is sponsored by the Germany on Campus program of the German Embassy in Washington, D.C.; the Heinrich Böll Stiftung; the UVA Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures; and the UVA Center for German Studies.
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