Cannes Holocaust film close to home for movie-making family

Published on Friday 18 May 2007 01:13

FATHER and son Rick and Ricky Wood usually make their living producing corporate and training films for oil companies in Aberdeen.

But their latest project has taken them in a new direction - from the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland to the Cannes Film Festival in France.

Film industry insiders are enthusing about Forgotten Souls, a short film which was written by Rick, directed by Ricky and inspired by a family member.

It is the story of a Holocaust survivor, played by Steve Weston, who lives in Scotland but is haunted by memories of the concentration camp.

Rick's mother spent two years in sub-camps of the infamous Dachau, the prototype for all other concentration camps.

Josie Wood lived a seemingly ordinary life in Aberdeen until she died three years ago at the age of 84. But she was born Madarda Maria Guiseppina Nuvoloni in Italy and was arrested by the Nazis in 1943 in France.

She was not Jewish, but was found in the company of two Jewish friends. That was sufficient crime for the Nazis to pack her off to Dachau. She was separated from the Jews and imprisoned in a labour camp.

"She used to tell us in the mornings before we went to school we should cherish what we were eating," said Rick, 55. "She said, 'I have seen people kill each other for food'.

"There were a number of Russian prisoners there; they were kept in a corral and they were thrown potato peels by the other prisoners as they went by. They actually got no rations whatsoever."

She escaped during a US bombing raid at the end of the war and made her way back to Italy. There she met Robert Wood, a soldier from Banchory, in Aberdeenshire, who had fought his way up through Italy from Salerno, had been wounded near Rimini and ended up in hospital.

Rick Wood said: "After my mother came out of the camp, she got a job in the Naafi stores. She had very short, cropped hair. She was just about bald, but I remember my father saying to me that he saw a good-looking woman."

After a romance, they married in Venice and Robert brought his bride back to Scotland.

Ricky Wood also has vivid memories of the stories his grandmother told him when he was a boy.

After her death, he began researching the concentration camps more thoroughly. The family visited Auschwitz and his father went to Dachau and laid a wreath, and they decided to make a film inspired by some of his mother's stories.

Ricky, 32, and his brother Ranald, 28, work with their father at TVP Film and Multimedia. It also made a recent SNP broadcast with Sir Sean Connery.

With Forgotten Souls, after initial reservations, they even persuaded the authorities at Auschwitz to let them do some discreet shooting there.

Forgotten Souls will screen in the Short Film Corner. "It's a huge achievement," said Christine McMillan of the public film agency Scottish Screen.