We are delighted to announce that The Return, a film by Mark Kaplan and Heidi Grunebaum, will premiere at Encounters Film Festival on 22 June in Cape Town (Labia) and on 30 June in Johannesburg (The Zone, Rosebank).

The title of the film, The Return, refers to many different returns: the return to a homeland, the return of the past, the return of the repressed, the return of ethnonationalism and annihilatory ideologies, and the return of hope that other ways are possible.

The film uses the returns of Jewish South African writer, Heidi Grunebaum, to the small, obscure German town of Hungen in Hessen province, to explore these many different returns across time, proximity and scale. Heidi’s grandmother, Emmi fled Hungen in 1936 and just managed to gain entry to settler colonial South Africa with all its racist laws and administrative cruelty immediately resonant. Neither Emmi nor her husband, Arthur, would see most of their family again. While finding traces of her family’s life in Hungen, Heidi encounters a troubling hierarchy where Germany’s official “memory” culture sets the Shoah apart from contemporary anti-racist struggles against extremist hate. In a filmic and poetic exploration of the politics of today, she links Germany to South Africa and Israel/Palestine, the dead to the living, the past and present, and the possibilities of imagining new solidarities from a postcolonial, Jewish diasporic point of view.