In 2016, I became a father. That was an incredible experience, but a difficult year. White nationalism and hatred of immigrants were given the biggest platform available in America. While I gave my daughter a bottle in the middle of the night, I listened to the news of children separated from their parents at the border. Swastikas were spray painted on synagogues and university offices, people were stabbed defending a woman in a hijab in Portland, and a gunman opened fire in the Tree of Life synagogue. The world that I hoped I would be raising my daughter in seemed to have turned upside down.
In the midst of it all, I found a card my grandma had written to me twenty years ago, thanking me for a donation from my allowance to her memorial project. "I hope some day that you can visit my hometown Sárvár," she'd written, "to see the monument and remember all we talked about." I stared at the card, at the photograph of the monument, wreaths laid beneath it, a path leading toward these giant stone shapes. I felt guilty and embarrassed that I had never been there; that my grandma died knowing I had not seen it, and maybe never would.
My grandmother never sat down and told me the story of her life– but before she died, she put everything she had into making sure that when I was ready, the monument would be there to speak to me. The heavy stones that she had laid in the town square of Sárvár; do they still talk?
Monument is a personal documentary about my visit to my grandmother’s memorial, and how we pass down the stories that are hard to tell. Monuments and memorials are communal efforts, and this film is my way of keeping her monument alive—and possibly, creating a new one in its shadow. Watch the trailer and learn more about the Monument project at our Kickstarter campaign site here: kickstarter.com/projects/1516460982/monument
Michael Turner is the creator of The Way We Talk (2016), an award-winning autobiographical documentary that has screened around the world and contributed toward a paradigm shift in how stuttering is perceived. His second feature, Monument, about Holocaust memory and inherited trauma, is currently in production. He lives with his wife and daughter in rural Oregon.