My Nature

The film describes a personal journey: the filmmaker returns to the site of her origins, a war-torn and ideologically tangled region, and documents the consequences of so many years of conflict and above all the ravages of time: the slow extinction of a rural community once bursting with life.

Harold 'Pepper' Roberts is an American hero. He is a veteran of the Korean War himself and the driving force behind the creation of a playable golf course for disabled veterans in Lakewood, WA. His story is told by up and coming Northwest filmmaker, Kirsten Turk Nghiem in this short documentary that won the 2011 Brotherton Community Champions Competition at this year's Seattle Film Festival.

Bearing Witness: The Voices of Our Survivors shares the collective stories of six Holocaust survivors from Germany, Poland, Greece, Netherlands, and Hungary. Their experiences ranged from living through anti-Semitism and Kristallnacht, surviving the Lodz Ghetto, fighting in the resistance, being shuffled between forced labor camps, suffering as slave laborers, escaping the death march, being smuggled into an orphanage, and hiding for nearly two years alone in an attic room. Bearing Witness fosters dialog between the survivors and today's Jewish youth, cultivating personal awareness and one's responsibility to learn from history. Through these survivors' individual stories, the Holocaust's collective history is shared. Through the survivors' personal memories and messages of hope, we are inspired by the human will to survive.

Sounds From the Fog chronicles the odyssey of a gay musician in Nazi Germany. Director Klaus Stanjek's cheerful Uncle Willi lived with his family, except when he was touring as a musician across Germany. Only when Willi turned 90 did his nephew Klaus Stanjek detect what his whole family had hidden: that Uncle Willi has spent eight years in Nazi camps and that he was gay. In a radical personal approach, veteran filmmaker Stanjek follows the complex turns that his family takes when they confront his Uncle Willi's secret. The result is a personal and political portrait of his beloved uncle, a talented singer and accordion player, that is one part historical inquiry and one part fascinating detective story.