Demon Box

Description

A wild and dynamic mixture of stylistic devices – creates a surprisingly calm, sensitive, deeply personal family story about the inheritance of trauma. – Dräxlmaier Innovation Award Jury

A film as endearingly chaotic as its filmmaker…masterfully crafted over ten years. – Fright Nights Jury

Bravery and poetry… the truth about wars cutting across generations and generations left forever wounded or scarred. – Bakunawa Film Festival Jury

Invites us to reflect on our own destinies and teaches us to reconsider them through the prism of love and generosity of the heart. – Toronto Jewish Film Festival Jury

Trailer

Synopsis

Ten years in the making. After festival rejections, a director revises his intensely personal short film about trauma, suicide, and the Holocaust, and transforms it into a painful, blunt and funny dissection of the film and his life.

Director

Sean Wainsteim

As a Jewish filmmaker it felt totally unnecessary and somewhat cliché to make my “Holocaust” film. What could I possibly add to the overwhelming volume of art, film and writing on the subject?

Ten years ago, I looked at my body of creative work. I drew lines between my use of dark fairy tale motifs and the Holocaust stories I heard going up. Hansel and Gretel escaped their oven. My entire family didn’t. My childhood was steeped in Holocaust atrocities casually recounted by people with concentration camp numbers on their arms as they sipped tea. Stories have power. Combined with the rise of Neo-Nazis in the 1980s, their stories of death and suffering contributed to feelings of fear and helplessness. As a teen, those feelings grew to dangerous levels until I decided I didn’t like who I was and took steps to stop myself from living. Thankfully, I didn’t succeed.

I desperately wanted to be brave and dive into the centre of the feelings I’d creatively circled for my artistic life. In the midst of trying to examine these emotions, I learned I was to become a father. It suddenly became disingenuous to try to honestly explore how generational trauma affected me without exploring where it would go. But since my son’s birth, I’ve wrestled with when and how to share these stories. Stories that almost killed me, but also make up a core part of who I am as a person and artist. My hope with DEMON BOX was that by expressing my own struggles, my son would be better able to approach the weight of our history. I poured everything into the project. My grandfather passed away shortly after we filmed. I poured in even more. This film was for him… and for my son.

It was only rejected from a few festivals, but I still took it personally. Was I not brave enough? Not honest enough? Was an animatronic-demonic-deer necessary to communicate my ideas? Was I a bad filmmaker?

In a series of voice-over sessions, I tore into the film and myself. I tried to be as raw and vulnerable as I could about what I felt and how I failed. When I lined those thoughts up to the film, I saw something I hadn’t seen before. The film felt like me. It was a mess… but trying to tell a story about trauma from within trauma is messy. And I learned that it’s better to tell a messy story than not to tell one at all. The process of making DEMON BOX illuminated new conclusions and led me to see my parents with more compassion. The film changed and empowered me. So… whether film festival acceptance happens or doesn’t, I’m proud of my odd, unclassifiable film, its journey and myself.