JANUARY 21 • 2021 | 29

Now professional colleagues
as filmmakers, the two have
revealed a biography in a film
appropriately titled Irmi.
The film is being spotlight-
ed Tuesday, Jan. 26, as the last
feature of the New York Jewish
Film Festival, which this year
is available to a wider audience
because of digital presentations
necessitated by the pandemic.
The lineup, running Jan. 13-26,
showcases 17 features and seven
shorts.
“I feel my mother lives on
when people experience her
presence and spirit,
” said Selver,
who has specialized in social
issue documentaries and whose
credits include KPFA on the Air,
Raising the Roof and Cape Song.
“Her story is an important part
of Jewish history, and I feel very
strongly about that.
”
The narration for the film,
which delves into how Irmi
connected with people and
worked into her 80s, resulted
from audio interviews Selver
had with Fanshel, whose earlier
documentaries include Nevelson
in Process, Made in the Bronx and
A Weave of Time, The Story of a
Navajo Family. Much of the per-
sonal video came from the cam-
era Selver often carried with her.
Selver, who began the film
before Fanshel joined the proj-
ect, was the fundraiser and
found the team. Both women
looked for archival material to
set the historical background
and jointly did the editing.

FEELING HER LOSS
“What I discovered in the course
of making the film is that, for
the first time, I could experience
my mother’s pain,
” Selver said.
“
As we were growing up, my
sister and I were very close and
determined to avoid resurrect-
ing that because we wanted to
keep her from living it again.
We didn’t deny it, but we kept it
under wraps.
“When the film gets to
the passage about losing her

family, I get to cry. That has
been my own release of pain.
Interviewing my sister for the
film, I discovered how she car-
ried the same weight of all my
mother went through.
”
Fanshel personally holds
many positive reactions to Irmi.
“
As Irmi’s story unfolds, I
think it becomes increasing-
ly moving because she was a
woman who seemed to rise to
every occasion in ways that are
very moving,
” Fanshel said.
“I hope the audience is moved
by Irmi’s experiences and uplift-
ed by her resilience and her
joie de vivre. Irmi had a gener-
osity of humanness. She really
enjoyed people and made them
feel special.
“Irmi wasn’t just resilient,
” she
added. “Instead of closing her
down, [her tragic experiences]
made her very empathetic and
sensitive to creating real connec-
tions to people of all ages and all
kinds. There was clearly some-
thing in her temperament that
life brought out.
”
That humanness and con-
tinuing contacts have played out
in Ann Arbor through Irmi’s
filmmaking daughter, who has
visited the city to see the people
so important to Irmi and then
later generations.
Selver’s niece, Anna Selver-
Kassell, who appears in the film,
saw her aunt during years as
a student at the University of
Michigan. Emily Santer Joyce,
who lives in Ann Arbor, trac-
es the closeness of families to
grandparents Trude and Max
Victor, referenced in the film
segment spanning years in
Holland and England.
“I hope the film comes across
showing the balance in Irmi’s
nature, which reveals positive
exuberance and gumption at the
same time it maintains the pres-
ence of the loss she carried with-
in her,
” Selver said. “I believe
Irmi shows you can overcome
something but still carry it with-
in you.
”