The Montagues and Capulets within the Czech post-communist context
- Date: 28 Jul, 2010 at 11:17PM,
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Working title for a documentary — Director: Olga Sommerova
Storytelling as a Way to Work through Inflexible Conflicts
The aim of this documentary is working through traumatic social experiences by involving two social groups. While exchanging their stories, Czech children (now middle-aged) of non-communist and communist political prisoners from the 1950s can gain insight into their unresolved pain and anger related to the past by developing an ability to listen to the pain of the “other.”
The storytelling approach was used by a psychologist Dan Bar-On To Reflect and Trust (TRT) between two groups — descendants of Nazi perpetrators and Jewish descendants of Holocaust survivors to work through inflexible conflicts in a dialogue.
In the context of inflexible conflicts, working-through helps to live with the painful past better than one has up to now. In the absence of this process, the repressed content may continue to interfere with one’s feelings, attitudes and behavior.
Such feelings, attitudes and behavior have transgenerational consequences. Silence within the Czech society and the family creates a double wall between generations. Those who lived during the communist regime do not talk and the post-communist generation does not ask. But the conspiracy of silence creates distrust, suspiciousness and lack of discourse within the society. Yet, working-through process may achieve what one of the Holocaust survivors’ descendant said about listening to the descendants of the Nazis: “It feels like I removed wax from my ears.”
Using the concept of Dan Bar-On in a Czech context, it ought to be interesting whether in this documentary, the Czech participant will echo the acceptance of the stories of the “other” as did the descendants of the Nazis and the Jews in the documentary “Children of the Third Reich.”
For the Czech viewers of the documentary, including students, acceptance of the stories based on the listening to each other, can develop an atmosphere of trust and acceptance that makes reflection on our recent history possible. We can conclude that audiovisual storytelling, under a professional moderator’s guidance and an experienced documentary director as Olga Sommerova, has the potential to build a relationship between these two groups and can be used between other groups with inflexible conflicts.
Jana Svehlova
Redakce: Zuzana Vittvarová