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Section: International Competition of Feature Films in the Junior Category (over 11 years of age)

My Father´s Secrets (2022) 13

"I was 12 years old. I loved chocolate ice cream and hated cabbage. We were an average Belgian family. But if you looked closely, we weren't quite like other families." So begins the story of Michel Kichka's Jewish family. He plays pranks on his younger brother Charly, teases his sister, who can't wait to get out of her parents' sight, and talks back to his mother at the dinner table. It introduces us to the environment of the Jewish community in a Belgian town in 1959. Through his childlike perspective, he also tries to figure out what it means when people talk about his father's stay in a war camp. What does the number on his forearm mean? What scared him when their tickets were checked on the train? What happened in a place called Auschwitz? This animated film is another cinematic reflection on the Holocaust, this time based on Michel Kichka's autobiographical comic The Things I Didn't Tell My Father.