History from Below: The Unimagined Lives of Our Neighbors, Three Film Portraits
The Unimagined Lives of Our Neighbors: Occupation Diary (2025), by Jeffrey Skoller
Los Angeles Filmforum presents
History from Below: The Unimagined Lives of Our Neighbors, Three Film Portraits
Jeffrey Skoller in person! Los Angeles premieres!
Sunday October 11, 2026, 7:30 pm
At 2220 Arts + Archives, 2220 Beverly Blvd. Los Angeles CA 90057
Tickets: $15 general, $10 students/seniors, free for Filmforum members
What are the experiences that shape the long lives of those we live among? Today, fascism, invasion, and the horrors of political violence have once again become part of our daily life. The Unimagined Lives of Our Neighbors is a series of film portraits of nonagenarians recounting their own experiences in history changing events that shaped the world and the rest of their own lives. Our communities are filled with the elderly who live quietly among us--often discarded, ignored and seen as valueless. Cloaked in an aura of frailty, we have little idea of the people they once were. Neither agents nor victims, these portraits are an attempt to give voice and memory to those who are still part of our communities and whose experiences in history altering events help enlarge and give personal dimension to our understanding of such past events.
Jeffrey Skoller is a writer and filmmaker. His films have been exhibited internationally. Screenings and exhibitions include: The Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley; Museum of the Moving Image, NY; JP Getty Museum, Whitney Museum, P.S. 1, Flaherty Film Seminar, NY; Arsenal Kino, Berlin; The Latin American Film Festival, Havana; National Film Theatre, London. His essays and articles on experimental film and video have appeared in numerous anthologies, artist catalogs and in journals including Film Quarterly; Discourse; Representations; Afterimage; Animation, World Records, Cinematograph, among others. He is the author of two books Shadows, Specters, Shards: Making History in Avant-Garde Film (University of Minnesota Press) and POSTWAR: The Films of Daniel Eisenberg (Blackdog Press). Skoller is Professor Emeritus in the Film & Media Dept. at UC Berkeley.
The Unimagined Lives of Our Neighbors: Occupation Diary
The Unimagined Lives of Our Neighbors: Occupation Diary
2025, digital, color, sound, 40 min. Los Angeles premiere!
Camera, Edit, Direction: Jeffrey Skoller
Editor: Zachary Epcar; Sound Mix: Ernst Karel
What are the experiences that shape the long lives of those we live among?
The Unimagined Lives of Our Neighbors: Occupation Diary is the second part of a series of film portraits of nonagenarians recounting their own experiences in history changing events that shaped the world and the rest of their own lives. Neither agents nor victims, these portraits are an attempt to give voice and memory to those elderly people who live quietly among us yet often unseen, are still part of our communities and whose experiences in history altering events help enlarge and give personal dimension to our understanding of such past events.
In Occupation Diary, Alex Matthews at 93, recounts his role in the largely unknown Guerilla resistance in the struggle against the horrors of Nazi Occupation of Greece that led up to the first Greek Civil war--the first cold war conflict of the post-war period and the first use of the American "containment policies." Using excerpts and images from his war dairies, family photographs, and other archival materials intercut with the sites of struggle in the present, Matthews recounts to his daughter what he witnessed 75 years earlier. In this intimate portrait, he is sstill trying to comprehend the devastation, violence he encountered, as a young man, as well as defending the ethics of some of his actions that lead up to leaving his beloved Greece forever.
Selected Screenings and Awards:
World Premiere: IMPACT HUB ATHENS, Athens, Greece, 2025
Best Experimental Film: London Greek Film Festival, 2025
The Unimagined Lives of Our Neighbors
The Unimagined Lives of Our Neighbors
Directed by Jeffrey Skoller
2019, digital, color, sound, 27 min. Los Angeles premiere!
Camera - David Borengasser
Editing assistance - Zachary Gallagher
What are the experiences that shape the long lives of those we live among? At 92, my neighbor, Berkeley denizen and Asian art scholar, Joseph Fischer, attempts to recount the life-changing experience of being among the first US Naval seamen sent into Hiroshima and Nagasaki, two weeks after the atom bombs were dropped. As an unwitting witness to one of great catastrophes of the 20th century, we see Fischer examining the photographs he took 75 years ago with a small Brownie camera. As he struggles to remember what he witnessed, he is still trying to comprehend the surreal sight of the total devastation he encountered wandering through the remains of these cities. Fischer scrutinizes the photographs of himself as a young man, standing in front of the piles of rubble and flattened city-scapes in these "bizarre tourist photos." The film moves between the silent exploration of Fischer's photographs and his intimate testimony, as he attempts to come to terms with what he came to understand later about what saw and what he no longer can remember.
Uprising in Jazak
Uprising in Jazak
Directed by Zelimir Zelnik
1973, b&w, sound, 18 min.
A film by the legendary pioneering member of the radical Yugoslav “Black Wave” film movement.
Now elderly, people from the village of Jazak in the former Yugoslavia show how they fought undercover against the Nazi occupation forces during the WWII. They speak about the dramatic events –We listen to people’s recollections of how they helped to hide partisans, joined partisan units and the arrests, persecution and tortures the endured. Finally in the autumn of 1944, the village was liberated and when Russians passed through their area. They remember the joy and great expectations because of the oncoming freedom and socialism.