Martha
2020 · 21m · Canada
Directed by Daniel Schubert
Genres: biography, documentary, historical
Tones: contemplative, darkly comic, tender
At 90, Martha Katz teases her grandson-filmmaker during a Los Angeles visit, while memories of being deported from Czechoslovakia to Auschwitz at fourteen surface alongside her postwar life in Winnipeg.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone expects the Holocaust doc to genuflect, but Schubert lets Martha crack jokes and heckle her grandson instead—the subversion isn't in the subject, it's in refusing solemnity, which somehow makes the deportation memories hit harder.
A masterclass in tonal interweaving: the film holds the archive of atrocity and postwar Winnipeg domesticity in the same frame without false equivalence, positioned squarely in the lineage of intimate historical testimony that asks what cinema owes to memory.
The decision to let Martha's present-tense teasing carry equal weight to the trauma—to trust that performance and humor won't diminish the historical weight—is the single cut that makes this work, and it elevates what could've been reverent into something alive.