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Red Trees, a film by Marina Willer
The Pentagram partner has made her first feature length film.
You may know Marina Willer as the designer behind the identities for the Tate Modern and Serpentine Galleries, among many others, or for the beautiful street-cover rubbings collected for her project Overlooked. In all of her free time, she also makes short films—and last week, she premiered her first feature length film, Red Trees.
It’s a personal project in every sense of the word. The movie tells the story of Willer’s family, one of only 12 Jewish families to survive the Nazi occupation of Prague during WWII. As Willer’s grandfather was a chemist, and one of the scientists to discover citric acid, the Czech government prioritized getting him and his family out of the country safely. When the Gestapo visited the Willers’ house before they left, her grandfather hid the formula in his wife’s recipe book.
After relocating to Brazil, Willer’s father grew up to become an architect, and much of the film’s story is told through images of Prague’s brutalist architecture—much of which was mercifully spared bombing because of the occupation. Willer’s approach is introspective and quietly poetic; you won’t find images of Hitler and concentration camps typical to World War II films in this work. As Steven Heller put it in a review of the film for Design Observer, “[Red Trees] changes the tenor of the holocaust narrative from an unimaginable, and therefore dismissible, act of evil into a singularly human, redemptive experience.”
Moreover, what started out as just a side project, and a break from graphic design, has taken on particular relevance given the refugee crisis and U.S. travel ban. In a 2015 interview, during the film’s early stages, Willer said, “The point of telling personal stories is that they become universal, and we can learn from history to not make this mistake again.”