Dana Plays Official Website

Charlotte Salomon’s Letter

A film by Dana Plays Directed, Written, Produced, Edited by Dana Plays
Specifications: 60 minutes, DCI 4K, DCP Available

Prior Screenings:
World Premiere: Viewpoint Documentary Film Festival, Ghent Belgium, April 13, 2026
Recognitions without Screenings:
Montreal Women Film Festival, Quebec, Award Winner, Best Pilot/Series, October 29, 2025
London Women Film Festival, UK, Award Winner, Best Experimental Feature, October 31, 2025
Replay International Film Festival, Vienna, Austria, Quarterfinalist, May 6, 2026

Summary: CHARLOTTE SALOMON’S LETTER (2026, 60 min, produced, directed and edited by Dana Plays) is a non-fiction film about the German Jewish Artist Charlotte Salomon who created her magnum opus ‘Life? or Theater?’ as a catharsis experience to prevent herself from suicide after finding out she was the sole survivor in her maternal family line of suicides while living in exile and under duress in the Côte d’Azur, France during WWII. Censored for more than 60 years was Salomon’s 35-page painted letter confessing to fatally poisoning her grandfather with an omelet laced with opium and veronal, in 1943, during the German occupation in the Côte d’Azur and her appreciation of her benefactor and protector, the filmmaker’s great aunt, heiress Ottilie Moore, on the estate where she was sheltered and created a large part of Life or Theater, and to whom ‘Life? or Theater?’ is dedicated. The film interweaves the visual paintings and written narratives by Salomon from her Life? or Theater series, with her censored letter read on screen by the late Austrian actor Birgit Doll (1956-2015) in German and filmmaker Dana Plays echoing from Life? or Theater? and expository narration in English, with personal archive of photographs, paintings and movies. Salomon was arrested and murdered at Auschwitz five months pregnant by her husband refugee Alexander, Ottilie Moore’s former lover also sheltered by Moore.
[Texts and images by Charlotte Salomon, Collection Jewish Historical Museum, Amsterdam© Charlotte Salomon; Foundation; Photographs concerning the life of Charlotte Salomon: Collection Jewish Historical Museum, Amsterdam]

Director Statement: As the grandniece of Ottilie Moore, I began researching the material about Ottilie through my family archives and filming various refugees that she sheltered on her property. Charlotte Salomon was one of those refugees sheltered and sponsored by Ottilie Moore. The Charlotte Salomon Foundation and the Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam have provided access to their archival collections related to Charlotte Salomon. I worked closely in pre-production for the director Frans Weisz on the research and development for his prior production which coincided with the making of my films, and as a result was able to license archival media with permission from the producer Frits Harkema of Quintus Film BV, including the Birgit Doll material (with permission from representatives of Birgit Doll’s estate). The censored letter was finally published in 2012, which clarified Ottilie Moore role in CS’s life, and in the development of Life or Theater, and Charlotte Salomon’s entire adult oeuvre, commissioned and sponsored by Ottilie Moore.

Charlotte Salomon’s Letter (2026, 60min) interweaves the artist’s work with the reading (by the late Birgit Doll (1956-2015) filmed in 2011, of a partially censored letter written by Charlotte Salomon at the completion of her magnum opus Life? or Theatre? My idea for the reading was to show the actor performing her reading, rather than burying her performance under B-Roll, sort on the vein of Spaulding Gray’s performed monologues. Charlotte Salomon’s Letter is part of a trilogy of feature films on Charlotte Salomon, and Ottilie Moore, that I have been in the making over several decades and are coming into completion in 2026.

CHARLOTTE SALOMON’S LETTER

CAST:

CHARLOTTE SALOMON (1913-1943)

BIRGIT DOLL (1956-2015) “Birgit Doll born in Vienna, Austria, was an actress and a theatre director. Through her 35 years of theatre and in film she worked with recognized directors as Ingmar Bergman, Michael Haneke, Peter Patzak and Otto Schenk. Birgit Doll appeared in 40 feature films and television productions.” – IMDb mini biography by: Ulf Kjell Gür


OTTILIE GOBEL MOORE (1902-1974) American Gentile heiress of German descent, as benefactor, rescuer, and protector of German Jewish artist Charlotte Salomon, enabling Salomon’s development of her magnum opus Life? or Theater? (Leben? oder Theater? : Ein Singspiel) (Attributed/Dedicated by Charlotte Salomon to Ottilie Moore). Charlotte Salomon embarked on the creation of widely eccentric artistic endeavor to save her own life after learning she was the sole survivor of her maternal line all of whom committed suicide. That endeavor was Life? or Theater? – an epic autobiographical work of art created by German-Jewish artist Charlotte Salomon between 1940 and 1942 while in hiding in the South of France, consisting of over 1300 gouache paintings, of which 760 were selected accompanied by text overlays and musical annotations, which narrate her life story, family tragedies, and experiences in Nazi Germany. Ottilie Moore sheltered Charlotte Salomon from 1938-1943, during WWII. Life? or Theater? was created between 1940 and 1942 (eighteen months at L’Hermitage and four months at nearby Hotel Belle Aurore in Saint Jean Cap-Ferrat in the Cote d’Azur).

GEORG STEFAN TROLLER (1921-2025) Journalist, Filmmaker, Author

Georg Stefan Troller was born in Vienna in 1921 and served an apprenticeship as a bookbinder. At sixteen, shortly after the November pogroms, he fled Nazi persecution via Czechoslovakia to France, carrying Karl Kraus’ »The Last Days of Mankind« in his luggage. He obtained an American visa in Marseille in 1941. In the U.S., he was drafted into military service in 1943 and arrived in Germany as a young GI in a team of German-speaking prisoner interrogators. He then studied English and drama at the University of California in Los Angeles, among other institutions, and began working as a reporter for newspapers and radio. Troller became famous with the WDR television magazine »Pariser Journal«, which he hosted and produced over fifty episodes between 1962 and 1971, often going against the station’s conventions. He later reflected on his involvement, stating that »This program is what made me a human being in the first place«. He has repeatedly received the Grimme Prize and the Golden Nymph of the Monte Carlo Television Festival and has also been honored with the Erich Salomon Prize (1975), the Television Film Prize of the German Academy of Performing Arts (1986), the Federal Cross of Merit (2002), the Schiller Prize of the City of Mannheim (2012), and the Honorary Prize of the German Documentary Film Award (2021), among others. Troller has lived in Paris since 1949.

JULIA WATSON, PROFESSOR EMERITUS Professor Emerita and former Associate Dean of Arts and Sciences, also affiliated with Project Narrative and Germanic Languages & Literatures. She has written extensive theoretical articles on Charlotte Salomon.

 
DANA PLAYS – PRODUCER/DIRECTOR, NARRATOR

Director’s Bio

Dana Plays is a filmmaker whose documentary work has involved creative biographies merging the personal to related historical/political ideologies. Using hybrid form Plays’ work explores a variety of documentary modality tropes, such as reflexive modes, personal narration, and visual montage and anthology approach, leading her long form features to miniseries format.

Plays has exhibited her work at the Whitney Museum of American Art and more than 50 international film festivals, including Edinburgh, Montreal Nouveau, and Seattle International Film Festivals. Her films have garnered more than 16 film festival awards including the prestigious First Prize Jurors’ Choice Award at the Black Maria Film and Video Festival for Nuclear Family; Tom Berman Award for Most Promising Filmmaker at the Ann Arbor Film Festival for Zero Hour; Best Experimental Film at the Houston International Festival for Across the Border; and Best Documentary Award at the New Orleans Film Festival for Love Stories My Grandmother Tells, which also was broadcast on VPRO, a Dutch national television network. Her work has exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art in the exhibition The Color of Ritual, The Color of Women Avant-Garde Filmmakers in America 1930-2000, programmed by Whitney curator by Chrissie Isles, as well as other notable venues including the Pacific Film Archive, SF Cinematheque and more than 50 international film festivals where her films have garnered 25 film festival awards. Plays’ work consists of a variety of approaches to experimental documentary and the visual film, utilizing optically printed found footage and/or footage that she has shot.

Dana Plays is an award winning experimental filmmaker, digital artist and professor of Film and Media Arts at The University of Tampa.

“Plays’ work falls within the rich terrain mapped out by the feminist avant-garde as it has emerged in the last 15 years; it represents a rich and astute reworking of feminist film theory as it collides with personal lives. This feminist project attempts to reclaim memory, snapshots, recreated images, sounds, voices, and discarded footage as historical traces. The exceptionally evocative cinematography and optical reprinting laced throughout all her films suggests that Plays’ project is to use manipulated images – whether through optical printing, composition, or light – to uncover their psychic imaginaries. Very, very few feminist filmmakers have the courage to unleash the ambiguities in voice and image; most want to anchor both. As a result, all of Plays’ work asks spectators to let go as they watch, and work within the interstices between sound and image.”

-Patricia Zimmermann, Professor, of Screen Studies, Ithaca College, Codirector of
Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival

As a critic who writes about experimental films, I am familiar with Dana’s extensive body of film work. I have been impressed by the eclectic range of themes and techniques she has explored and developed throughout her career. In subject matter, her films range from ethnographic studies to formal explorations of the cinematic image. She is an adept documentarian, as well as master of the art of optical printing. Although her films are varied, there is a personal vision and a sense of integrity and purposefulness that unites them into a coherent whole. Dana approaches political issues such as the people of El Salvador and the United States government with sensitivity. Never heavy-handed or didactic, her films manifest her political convictions in a lyrical, personal way. Her films also have a consistent sensual richness; their lush imagery is organized into dynamic compositions that unfold with graceful rhythmic patterns of repetitions and variations.”
– Christine Tamblyn, Film Critic and Scholar (1951-1998)

Distribution and Contact information

Dana Plays
danaplays@gmail.com

CREDITS

  • Dana Plays -Producer Director Writer Cinematographer – Selected Other Credits – DirectorOttilie Moore_ Heiress in the Resistance; Love Stories My Grandmother Tells,Demise of Sugar, The Longest Walk, Across the Border, Birth of a Pipe Organ, and more
  • Charlotte Salomon Writer”Life? or Theater” A Singing Game (1942); Letter to Beloved Friend (1943)
  • Quintus Films BV Frits Harkema Producerlife or Theater (2072), Raffa (2073), Sdvig (2006), Boy Ecury (2003)
  • Birgit Doll Key Cast”Self and Charlotte Salomon” The Seventh Continent (1989, Directed by Michael Hanake); Trauma (1984) Charlotte (1980); Tales from the Vienna Woods (1979); Fast Forward TV Series (207 0); Mikado (2008)
  • Charlotte Salomon Key Cast”Self/in Photographs, her artwork, and her writing”Charlotte, Life and the Maiden (2023) Charlotte (1980); Life? Or Theater? (207 2); Charlotte,
  • Paul Staartjes Camera Life or Theater (207 2), Suite 275, Last Maar Zitten Holland: Natuur in de Delta (207 5), Tax Free TV Series, 7 episodes (1992- 7993)
  • Gregoor van de Kamp Location Sound The Hitman’s Bodyguard (207 7), Life or Theater (207 2), Black Book (2006), The Shaft (2007)
  • Frans Weisz Casting Director Life or Theater (207 2)

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