Flashback

The Latvian director Herz Frank has numerous films to his credit and received many awards when he decides to make a sequel to 10 MINUTES OLDER from 1978. All we see in this short film is the face of a small boy watching a puppet show. It is a beautiful display; in ten minutes’ time, the spectator sees a world of human emotions pass by. ’20 years older’, Frank wants to call the sequel and for shooting it he visits the boy from the 1978 film. But suddenly, different circumstances cause the filmmaker to land in a personal crisis. He asks himself what is the value of making documentaries, the repeated recording of other people’s lives. And he decides to focus on his own life for a change. In this profoundly personal film, which is the reflection of his confusion and meditations of this period, Frank takes the spectator along on a subjective journey, criss-cross through his past and present. We see images from the past: photos of his father, who imparted the love of photography to him. We hear the gruesome stories about his family, the larger part of whom was killed during World War II, and we see the circumcision of his grandson. The scenes with his wife Ira, who is ill and eventually dies, are very sad. All these memories and images make him realise that all his work orbits around a single: a man can know himself only at a fatal margin