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.
”