Being involved in projects for the Shoah Foundation has been particularly special for me (not least of all because we all hope to do work which makes our grandparents proud!).

The Shoah Foundation, set up by Steven Spielberg, is dedicated to overcoming prejudice, intolerance, and hatred through the educational use of the testimonies in the Visual History Archive - which contains 54,000 visual testimonies, one of the largest video archives in the world. The vast majority of the testimonies contain a complete personal history of life before, during, and after the interviewee’s firsthand experience with genocide. http://sfi.usc.edu/

I was lucky enough to be chosen as the UK interviewer first for a series of testimonies for a project on Contemporary Antisemitism, a series exploring conditions today across Europe. I interviewed Luciana Berger MP, Dave Rich (author) and Liron Velleman (political organiser) in 2018.

The Shoah Foundation later gave me the incredible opportunity to interview two Kindertransport children, now in their mid-late 90s, about their experiences of fleeing Nazi Germany as teenagers, and the fates which befell their families.

The unusual thing about Shoah Foundation interviews is the format - this is also the challenge when it comes to running the interviews. Interviews run between 1-3 hours - with no cuts. For veracity and to preserve the truths and storytelling of the individual, interviewers take the interviewees through the longform interviews, always guiding, never pausing or stopping. Quite the experience.

I got to do most of these with Oli Cohen DoP as a team of two. I couldn’t have worked with anyone better for this. We were emotionally affected in similar ways, always empathetic and looking out for eachother, as well as our interviewees.