Australian filmmaker Su Goldfish turns her camera on herself, in this deeply affecting documentary about her own decades-long search for identity, a sense of belonging, and the truth about her father’s traumatic past.

Born in Trinidad, Goldfish spent an idyllic childhood on the Caribbean island with her English mother and German father. It was just the three of them—though letters for her father, written in German (which she never learned because her father refused to speak it at home), occasionally arrived from France. Then, as a young teenager, Goldfish made some surprising discoveries about her enigmatic but charming father—first, that he had an ex-wife and children living in Canada and, second, that he was Jewish, and that he had just barely escaped the Holocaust, landing in Trinidad as a refugee in 1939.

As Goldfish finds and establishes her own identity as a young queer woman and artist in Australia in the 1970s and ’80s, she sets about uncovering her father’s extraordinary and heartbreaking story. It’s a journey that will take her around the world: back to Germany and on to the far corners of the European Jewish diaspora, as she seeks to know not only the ghosts of the past but also newly discovered living relatives. Beautifully augmented by a personal archive of photos that stretches across a century, this powerful documentary also reveals the repercussions of forced migration across generations.

— CHARLES PURDY