TAIBALE, story of a rescued child

The documentary tells the untold story of 85-year-old Antonieta Felmanas (in Yiddish, Taibale Reichel), a powerful testimony of survival and empathy. Before World War II, her Jewish family, the Reichel, lived in Kazyany (formerly Poland, then Lithuania, and now Belarus). After the USSR-Germany pact, the Russians entered their territory and ordered her mother—despite being pregnant with Antonieta—to perform forced labour in Kazakhstan, where Antonieta was born on May 1, 1940.

Her entire family and relatives were exterminated by the Nazis. From the first Soviet invasion, Antonieta experienced the violence of expulsion and tragedy, which culminated with the arrival of German troops. Forced to flee, she was hidden first by a Christian baron and later by a peasant couple. At the end of the war, she was rescued by her cousin Rivka, a Partisan fighter, with whom she undertook a perilous journey from Lithuania to Italy. There, a Jewish organisation called “Joint” connected Rivka with a distant Brazilian relative willing to adopt Antonieta.

At the age of six, she arrived in São Paulo, Brazil. As she grew up, she developed a profound sense of solidarity and fraternity with those who had nothing. In adulthood, she became an active philanthropist, co-founding some of the country’s most important socio-cultural institutions and, in the challenging outskirts of São Paulo, the Anchieta Grajaú Institute, located in a beautiful Atlantic forest. One night, the institute was invaded by 5,000 homeless people who, by burning and devastating the forest, rapidly built a favela. While in the city all the other 40 occupations were dismantled by the army, the only one who opposed repression and instead chose to welcome and protect the invaders was Taibale, who still repeats today: “No one deserves to be expelled from the place where they live.”

Her inspiring story exemplifies the power of solidarity and the capacity for transformation in the face of adversity.

The film is narrated in the first person by the protagonist and enriched with extensive archival material—photographs, unpublished audio recordings, and an innovative experiment in which memory is complemented with images generated by artificial intelligence, giving rise to a new, previously nonexistent genre: the DocumentAI.