Nelly & Nadine

Christmas 1944 in Ravensbrück concentration camp. At the site of one the twentieth century’s worst horrors, the androgynous bohemian Nadine congratulated the Belgian opera singer Nelly on her performance, and an undying love was born. Both women were immediately enraptured. After the war, they found each other again and spent the rest of their lives together in Venezuela. Their relationship and story was not spoken about in their families. For twenty years, Nelly’s granddaughter, Sylvie Bianchi, has preserved her grandmother’s papers in her attic. Only now has she found the courage, in the quiet calm of her farm in France, to reconstruct Nelly’s eventful life. She bravely faces the painful process of remembering a lesbian love that could only be lived in the shadows, finding its traces in photographs, audio recordings, and Super-8 films. Nelly’s diary entries, read in voice-over, contain a literary power that evokes both the hell of life in the camp and the irrepressible will to survive sparked by their love.