Nelly & Nadine

At the end of World War II, a boatload of women survivors of Nazi concentration camps debarked in Malmo, Sweden, to begin new lives. Someone filmed this, and this is director Magnus Gerten third movie tracking down the stories of the women shown in that bit of film.

This one is an amazing and touching transcontinental Lesbian love story, spanning prewar literary salons, World War II resistance, survival in the concentration camps, separation, reunification, and a new life in South America.

Note to screenwriters: this would make a hell of a good fiction film, when you aren't constrained by what pictures happened to survive....

Nelly & Nadine (2022) is a documentary film co-written and directed by Magnus Gertten. After the German defeat, a boatload of women who had survived the concentration camps were brought to Sweden. Someone filmed the event, and director Gertten has previously identified two people in the film and made movies about them. This is the third movie, and it involves two women--Nelly Mousset Vos and Nadine Hwang.

The two women met and fell in love in Ravensbrück concentration camp. They were separated, but both survived. Years later, Nelly's granddaughter contacted director Gertten, who made this meticulous documentary about a lesbian couple who traveled all over the world in order to be together.

Nelly & Nadine has a good IMDb rating of 7.3. I thought it was an outstanding movie, and rated it 10. We saw this film as part of Rochester's great ImageOut, the LGBTQ Film Festival.

I watched it and it left me with a lot of questions. To many...

It felt they didn't share all what was inside grandma's box... Instead we get to see this granddaugter who wasn't even curious enough to look inside this box for more then 20 years; when she got the box from her mother. This story is about two brave women and we start with seeing the opposite, the scared granddaughter.

I missed the simple details about the grandmother. Who was this woman before the Nelly & Nadine Story started? Where was Nadine burried?

Instead we get to see the same 8mm homemovies over and over again and this creates this image of two older women in your head. And when seeing that one photo again, the one with a younger Nadine wearing thick glasses, or the video of Nadine arriving in Sweden you get confused.

It lacks certain details... crucial details that can be found with a little research.

At the very start of this documentary, we are shown a photograph of a woman staring into the camera. It's fairly unlikely she knew it was pointing at the group in which she was standing, but it was taken as the Ravensbrück concentration camp was being liberated by the Swiss Red Cross in 1945. She is quickly identified as Nadine Hwang and now director Magnus Gertten tries to piece together her story. For that, he is fortunate. She kept a series of diaries and when it falls to her grand-daughter to finally read them - with quite a degree of emotion-laden trepidation - we discover that before the war she was in a loving relationship with Nelly Mousset Vos. With the aid of photographs and the sometimes quite harrowing narration from her text, we trace the lives of these two women both before and after the horrors of the Nazi invasion. Not wishing, in any way, to trivialise this - but as a documentary it's all a bit lightweight. The story itself is one that's truly ghastly, empowering, emotional and sometimes quite shocking, but factually there is just way too much missing, and what we do have to go on and/or know is squeezed just once too often. It might actually have made for a better source as a drama, allowing some of the understandable gaps to be filled in, albeit speculatively, and leaving less scope for us to have to make our own guesses about their difficulties not just with the SS but with a society as yet unfamiliar with their candid and loving lesbianism. Much of the heavy lifting comes from the soundtrack - it turns out Nelly was quite a good singer, too - but somehow it's really only the shell of a poignant story that falls disappointingly short. It is worth watching, and the plentiful photographs and some archive footage add a little richness, but it doesn't quite deliver.

I was already interested when I first heard about this documentary feature, but as someone who primarily watched fiction and especielly so on the theater, I gave it a pass for the time being.

When I heard it was nominated for the Swedish equailent of the Oscar, 'Guldbagge', my interest peaked once more, and I was able to catch it on TV.

For what it is, and as simply told it is, it's a very beautiful documentary. It's shot and edited very well and tells a very emotional and incredible love story, that was very interesting to be sure.

Overall, I would recommend it if you're looking for an interesting documentary. In that area, it's very incredible indeed!