Klänge des Verschweigens

There were other groups of people, besides the most frequently mentioned Jewish victims, who were persecuted by the Nazis and ended up in death camps. These included political opponents of the regime, the Romani and homosexuals. Willi Heckmann, a singer, musician and the uncle of the director of Sounds from the Fog, spent eight years in one of these extermination camps due to his homosexuality. The film shows not only the story of his life, but also the attempts to fill in the blanks of his tale. The path to the revelation of family secrets leads the director to the archives, living witnesses and places his uncle had been. Gradually, more general questions are brought into the foreground, for instance the relation between collective and individual memory and the process of forgetting, or rather, the intentional forgetting of unwanted memories. The past is brought back to life with animated photographs shown in the film, leaving behind a fickle image of history marked by the subjective point of view we share today. In the end, the only remaining threat is a frightening deformation of the past caused by a lack of reliable facts. (Academia Film Olomouc)