Too complicated? Can’t be done? Not for Fixafilm’s experts! We had the honour of being part of the making of Who Will Write Our History, a dramatised documentary directed by Roberta Grossman. The entire venture was executive-produced by Nancy Spielberg, and the film is a Polish–US co-production, involving Katahdin Productions in America and Match&Spark in Poland.
We agreed to do some unusual and highly complex colour-correction for this film. Our experienced colourist, Gosia Grzyb, not only adjusted the film footage to imitate the palette of the original wartime source footage, but also digitally aged the contemporary footage. Additionally, our team restored various archive material and processed some interviews shot on green screen. Grossman’s film is based on Samuel Kassow’s book of the same title, which described the clandestine activities of the Oyneg Shabes organisation that documented the lives (and eventual extermination) of the Jewish community in the Warsaw Ghetto. Hundreds of thousands of letters, photographs, reports and recollections buried deep underground in metal boxes – such was the legacy they left behind in the hope that the world would not forget about them and the crimes that had been committed. The Oyneg Shabes Archive became one of the most valuable sources of information on the lives of the ghetto’s residents. Today, still only around two-thirds of the hidden documents have ever been found.
Now we can look back on those events, thanks to Grossman’s film which combines a fictionalised
adaptation of the book, interviews with historians, and archival film footage restored by Fixafilm.
