Lisa Rea Currie

As I continue to discover the shape of my weeks as freelancer, I found myself watching A Real Pain at 2pm on Friday afternoon. 

It was a beautiful film and I loved the story of two very different cousins trying to reconnect with each other after the trauma of losing their grandmother and initially hidden mental-health problems. The cousins, straight-laced David (Jesse Eisenberg) and free-spirited Benji (Kieran Culkin) set out to visit their late grandmother's hometown in Poland. The first part of their trip facilitated by a tour group exploring the broader context of why their grandmother had left her country of origin- the Holocaust. 

The group the cousins join for their tour is made up of people carrying their own personal traumas, from marriage breakdown to surviving the Rwandan genocide. It is no surprise then that they bring their varying levels of resilience to the experience of visiting sites of atrocities.

The first major area of conflict between the group arises on a train journey when Benji feels an overwhelming sense of guilt about being on a train in Poland, associating strongly with his predecessors who would not have experienced the same luxury or comfort as they were transported towards their possible deaths in concentration camps. The group debates whether they should feel guilt to now be in luxury when generations before them suffered. Benji decides to go to the back of the train where he thinks his conscience might be appeased, while James the tour guide checks in with the group to make sure they aren't uncomfortable by the confrontation and subsequent discussion Benji caused. 

The second major confrontation between Benji and James the tour guide occurs in a graveyard. In his search for authenticity, Benji implores James for something 'real', James replies: "It's all real, I've only said real things." Benji goes on to explain that they haven't met anyone 'from there', all of their information has been mediated through James, a very nice man from England with no Jewish heritage. The facts weren't enough. The story wasn't enough. The missing connecting piece was the people who hold the stories. A fact complicated through the history that removed people from the land, exemplified when the cousins attempt to leave visitation stones at their grandmother's old house and the neighbours hold no knoweldge of who she was, her story or the cultural practice. 

I came away from watching it, thinking about my own practice and how willing am I to let people sit in the discomfort of contested heritages?  I, like James, am maybe very quick to jump in to rescue people from an uncomfortable situation but maybe we need to embrace the discomfort, name it and unpack it like Benji tried to, while mindful of creating a space that people can remove themselves from if it becomes too much - challenging on a moving train. 

When working with contested histories, the Principles of Remembering, developed for the Decade of Centenaries in Ireland suggests "starting with the facts", but in this instance we see that it was not enough. Can we first agree what the facts are? Even in the case of the Holocaust there seems to be a worrying and growing movement to dismiss the facts. The facts, divested of people and context seem meaningless. 

Maybe we start with the people.