Once There Was a Wild Water Spirite is a documentary that interweaves director Claudia von Alemann’s family history and the history of Nazi Germany. Alemann’s mother, Alemann, and her daughter all appear in this documentary where daughter and granddaughter ask about and listen to the mother/grandmother’s experiences under the Nazi regime. The director’s mother, Ludmilla, goes back with her daughter and granddaughter to Thuringia, Seebach, the village in the former German Democratic Republic where she lived during Hitler’s regime, and recollects the past. The film explains Nazism from a point of view that was seldom shown until now. Most of the Germans at that time, including Ludmilla, supported and upheld Hitler’s nationalist socialism. The granddaughter weeps because of her grandmother, who expressed support for Hitler’s rule and the oppression of others by not resisting and remaining silent. The film lets us reflect on how simply having lived in the principal offending nation in the war itself, one is not free from the judgement of history, and how it burdens later generations with guilt and shame. (Kim Seon-A)