Lab’s Holocaust Film Moves Audiences, Draws Upon Unique Collaboration

10.24.2022

An animated short film about the Holocaust, produced by University of Texas at Dallas faculty and students, is gaining international attention.

“A Lasting Image” is a stop-motion animation project that captures one person’s experience during the Holocaust. The film has been accepted into several festivals – including one in Ukraine — and recently won an award at a festival in Italy. The project will be shown in Poland along with many other films on International Animation Day, Oct. 28. UT Dallas will also show the film that day at 3 p.m. in the ATC Lecture Hall (ATC 1.102), joining hundreds of screenings of various contemporary animated films at celebrations of the day around the globe.

The idea to create an animated film about the Holocaust developed after discussions between Dr. Christine Veras, assistant professor of animation, and Dr. Nils Roemer, dean of the School of Arts, Humanities, and Technology (AHT) and director of the Ackerman Center for Holocaust Studies. The goal was to showcase the production at the center’s Annual Scholars’ Conference on the Holocaust and the Churches, held last March on the UTD campus.

“There are so many stories related to the Holocaust that we initially were overwhelmed,” Veras said.

Veras and her team of three students from her experimenta.l. Animation Lab researched the project by visiting the Dallas Holocaust and Human Rights Museum, reading books and listening to interviews with Holocaust survivors. They ultimately found just the right story in the audio testimony of Dr. Zsuzsanna Ozsváth, a former professor of literature and history and a Hungarian-Jewish Holocaust survivor who founded the Holocaust Studies Program at UTD. Her story is preserved in the USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive. She also tells her story of the summer of 1944 in Budapest during the time of the German occupation in her book “When the Danube Ran Red.”

Inspired by Ozsváth’s story, Veras wrote the script and supervised the production, which was fully animated by the students. The team had regular meetings with Roemer, who provided historical context and helped to ensure the accuracy of the details of the story.

Scott Huddleston, Kirstin Stevens Schmidt and Ana Villarreal work on the storyboard for “A Lasting Image.”

The three students, senior Scott Huddleston and juniors Kirstin Stevens Schmidt and Ana Villarreal – all arts, technology, and emerging communication majors – shared the animation tasks, which included developing a storyboard and character design, adding music and sound effects, and creating the actual animation.

Schmidt said the team worked hard to represent the importance of the subject.

“We wanted to bring justice to victims and survivors and everybody else involved in the story,” she said.

Veras said the use of charcoal hand drawings and paper cutouts in the animation put a human touch on an important subject.

“I had always wanted to use animation to tell important stories that have an emotional impact, but also to create a call to action to create change and to build awareness,” Veras said. “People normally associate animation with children’s stories or cartoons, so it was really important to show that we can share such powerful moments with this medium.”

The final animated piece is just over three minutes long. When it was first shown at the Holocaust conference, Roemer said the attendees were stunned and moved by the piece.

Roemer, the Stan and Barbara Rabin Distinguished Professor in Holocaust Studies, and the Arts, Humanities, and Technology Distinguished University Chair, said the project is a good model for the kind of collaboration that takes place in AHT.

“There are endless opportunities for professors to partner together and for students to partner with faculty to create unique experiences,” he said. “This is exactly the type of thing we should be doing because we have such great depth inside of the school.”

–Phil Roth