“Borderland Memories” merges historical images with new recordings, fol-lowing filmmaker Edie Steiner’s quest to locate her father’s ancestral home in Lower Silesia. Her ancestors were among the millions of ethnic Germans expelled from Silesia when it was annexed to Poland after WW2. The project explores the loss of intergenerational cultural belonging the filmmaker experi-enced as a German immigrant child of the mid-20th century, a post-Holocaust identity implicated in the crimes of the nation she was born into. Over several journeys to Silesia, she traces her Jewish ancestral line at national archives in Poland, interviews local residents in the village of her ancestors, and en-gages in discourses with cultural scholars and experts in migration and border studies. Performing most of her own cinematography, Ms. Steiner’s project investigates borderlands as negotiated spaces mediated by images, culture, and language. Working between still photography, moving images, archival sources, family documents, original artwork, on-screen text, and sound record-ings, the film is constructed from a variety of technologies and both digital and analogue processes.
