How a Canadian film is animating the difficult story of an underappreciated artist

Charlotte co-director Tahir Rana will admit that he did not know who Charlotte Salomon was until he saw a script about her life — a Jew who fled Nazi Germany only to end up in Vichy France, and whose discovery of a family history of suicide and mental illness prompted a series of autobiographical paintings that would outlive her.

"Charlotte sort of felt that the walls were closing in on her," said Rana. Her response was to make art. 

The Canadian director felt compelled to make this story come to life. 

"I begged and pleaded to get the opportunity to work on the film," the Mississauga-based director said. "Once I read the script … I realized what an extraordinary life she led and this story was ... so valuable to tell."

 Her story is now being told in an animated film set to release in theatres today. 

One person who has long known Salomon's story is the film's producer Julia Rosenberg. When Rosenberg was 13, she received a copy of Salomon's Life or Theatre?, which she says many consider to be the first graphic novel.

"Charlotte's work was really important to me. And over the years, I would offer it as a gift to certain people who came into my life who were important to me," Rosenberg said.

The idea for the film came to her one morning when she was out for a run. "I had the idea that Charlotte Salomon drew her life story. So I needed to produce a drawn version of her life story as well," she said.

Ten years after that morning run, Charlotte is ready for release. Along the way the animated feature, which played at TIFF last year and stars Kiera Knightley, became a Canadian-French-Belgian co-production.  

Born in Berlin in 1917, Salomon's life was marked by tragedy; her namesake aunt died by suicide before she was born, as did her mother when she was a young girl. 

She was able to enroll in the State Art Academy of Berlin in 1936, despite restrictions that allowed only 1.5 per cent of the school to be Jewish. Around January 1939, Salomon was sent to be with her maternal grandparents in the south of France in order to escape Nazi Germany.  

Learning about her family history of mental illness and suicide while living in southern France prompted Salomon to create Life or Theatre?, an autobiographical work comprised of 769 of the more than 1,200 gouaches she painted in a matter of months. 

"She was very hurried, almost kind of had the idea that her time on this Earth was limited, that there [were] forces coming to get her," Rana said. "I like the way that Charlotte used her artistic talent to sort of triumph over those forces that were coming to get her and that she left behind a legacy for herself."

In 1943, at age 26 and five months pregnant, Salomon was taken with her husband by the German Gestapo from the south of France and sent to Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland, where she was killed, more than likely on the day she arrived.