This is all bookended again by the Swedish footage. It is implied that Bianchi’s mother, Nelly’s daughter, felt abandoned when she moved in with Nadine. This story is enmeshed with Bianchi’s conflicted feelings about her grandmother. An account of the terror of the Holocaust becomes a tale of lesbian love and then a rare insight into the couple’s apparently clandestine social life – which also involved a gay couple, Jack and Raymond – after the women relocated to Venezuela, where they posed as cousins. The fact that Gertten has mined it elsewhere goes some way to explaining why this amazing footage barely features here: glimpses of the women themselves and the way civilisation swiftly reasserted itself – survivors are shown eating a formal lunch at a white-clothed table – are tantalisingly brief.Īnother reason that Gertten doesn’t linger on this footage is because there is an awful lot going on in Nelly and Nadine. One of them is Hwang, a bereft face amid the elation – something that drew the interest of this documentary’s director, Magnus Gertten, a man who has spent his career studying this archive film and tracking down the women shown (he has made two other films based on his discoveries: Harbour of Hope and Every Face Has a Name). Nelly and Nadine opens with footage of liberated German concentration camp survivors arriving in Sweden in 1945. This is a piece of social history unspooled via family secrets. After spending five days in a cattle wagon packed so tightly with others that she cannot move, leaving her trapped amid the putrid stench of dysentery, she arrives at the “antechamber to hell” and falls asleep on the floor. Her poeticism is startling: when it snows, the barbed wire encircling the camp appears to be “dusted with powdered sugar”.

The diary tells of how Nelly Mousset-Vos – an opera singer who Bianchi later discovers worked for a Belgian resistance network (she was not Jewish) – was arrested in Paris in 1943 “torn away from this world”. Now, she is finally ready to face this account of the horrors her grandmother survived. For 20 years, Sylvie Bianchi has been gathering the strength to read these pages. Among them is her grandmother’s diary: an account of her imprisonment in Nazi concentration camps, first Ravensbrück, a female-only camp in Germany, and later Mauthausen in Austria. A middle-aged woman hovers anxiously in her idyllic French farmhouse kitchen, its table strewn with reams of yellowing papers.

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