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Magnus Gertten’s film follows an ambassador’s daughter and an opera singer who fell in love while being held by the Nazis

This documentary opens with newsreel footage of concentration camp survivors arriving by boat in Sweden in 1945 – they are mostly women, smiling and waving at the camera. Director Magnus Gertten explains that he’s spent years trying to put names to the faces. One is a Dutch socialist and feminist who returned to Amsterdam after the war to her women’s health clinic; another a 16-year-old Jewish girl from Poland with a beautiful smile who does not yet know that she is the only survivor in her family. Finally, the face of a Chinese woman, not smiling, but fixing the camera with an intense stare.

This last is Nadine Hwang, born into privilege in Madrid, the daughter of China’s ambassador to Spain and a Belgian mother. The...

Near the end of World War II, Sweden––which had managed to remain neutral during the conflict––conducted one of the most successful humanitarian missions of the whole period. Known as the “White Buses” operation due to the color of the paint used to transport Scandinavians freed from concentration camps back to safety, the operation rescued more than fifteen thousand people between March and May of 1945.

One of them was Nadine Hwang, the glamorous daughter of the Chinese ambassador to Spain who had moved among the most exclusive intellectual and artistic circles in pre-war Paris. It’s most likely that it was due to her participation in activities to aid the Resistance, that Hwang found herself imprisoned in Ravensbrück, an all-women’s camp north of Berlin. But I’m getting ahead of myself, a sin never committed by director Magnus Gertten in his moving documentary Nelly & Nadine.

Gertten introduces us...

Positive trends in filmmaking are hard to come by these days, so a recent wealth of documentaries uncovering lost chapters of queer history is cause for celebration. This year saw “Casa Susanna” and “Loving Highsmith,” two excellent entries in a growing canon that can always use more. While those films discovered a queer community ahead of its time and celebrated one of our most influential lesbian writers, the poignant documentary “Nelly & Nadine” Bolstered by gorgeous archival Super 8 footage of queer life in the 1950s, “Nelly & Nadine” offers a tender romance with a surprisingly vibrant slice of queer history.

Directed by Swedish filmmaker Magnus Gertten, “Nelly & Nadine” is told through the perspective of Sylvie Bianchi, a genial woman who lives with her husband on a farm in Northern France. Open-hearted and vulnerable, she is proud to share the story of her grandmother, even if the retelling makes her quite emotional. Her grandmother,...

French author and now filmmaker Annie Ernaux is having a year. She was just awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize for literature. Her autobiographical L’Événement was adapted by director Audrey Diwan into the critically acclaimed Happening, released last spring. And this weekend, Kino Lorber presents her directorial debut, The Super 8 Years, at Film at Lincoln Center and Dctv Firehouse in NYC, expanding to LA and select markets through January.

The Super 8 Years, a visual extension of Ernaux’s decades-long literary quest to distill the past and future, is culled from home movies taken between 1972 and 1981, after her husband Philippe acquired an 8mm camera that became a family fixture. The film, a collaboration with her son David Ernaux-Briot, had its world premiere at Cannes Directors’ Fortnight and screened at Busan, Rome, New York and Zurich Film Festivals. It’s a range of times and places, from holidays and family events in suburban France to trips in Albania,...

This year brought several WWII documentaries that took their inspiration from images in old footage, including “Three Minutes: A Lengthening” and “From Where They Stood.” The latest of these, Magnus Gertten’s “Nelly & Nadine,” makes outstanding use of this compelling approach.

Gertten has actually already employed this method, with his 2015 film “Every Face Has a Name.” His intention then was to identify as many people as possible in footage of survivors who arrived in Sweden on April 28, 1945. One of them was Nadine Hwang, though nothing else was known about her. During a screening of the film, Gertten was approached by a French farmer named Sylvie Bianchi, who told him that Hwang was her grandmother’s secret lover.

The story only gets more astonishing from there. Bianchi’s grandmother, Nelly, was once a celebrated Belgian singer who worked as a member of the Resistance. She was arrested by the Gestapo in...

Magnus Gertten's documentary begins in a similar fashion to the recent Three Minutes: A Lengthening, with a piece of archive film, this time from immediately after the war, as concentration camp survivors arrive in Malmo, Sweden. It's footage with which the director has become intimately familiar with since he first encountered it in 2007, and which was also the jumping off point for his 2011 film Harbour of Hope and 2015's Every Face Has A Name, in which he tried to uncover the histories for some of the survivors shown here. In a way, each film has triggered another, since it was after Sylvie Bianchi - who will become a key figure in this documentary - saw the latter that she came forward with the information that Gertten expands on here.

The person she had recognised was Nadine Hwang, who unlike many of those on the film who smile and wave.