NELLY & NADINE

Nelly & Nadine is the unlikely love story between two women falling in love on Christmas Eve, 1944, in the Ravensbrück concentration camp. For many years their relationship was kept a secret. – During World War 2, in the middle of the horrors of the war camps, Nelly and Nadine begin their life-long journey. On Christmas Eve the Belgian prisoner and opera singer Nelly Mousset-Vos had been asked to sing Christmas carols in one of the French populated Ravensbrück barracks. After a couple of songs, a voice calls out from the dark: “Sing something from Madame Butterfly!”. Nelly hesitates, but then she sings “Un bel di vedremo”, an aria about the waiting for a loved one. Afterwards the woman who requested the song from Madame Butterfly emerges from the darkness. She kisses Nelly and says: “The Good Lord has been kind to us”. Her name is Nadine Hwang and in this moment Nelly and Nadine become a couple, spending as much time together as possible… Nelly & Nadine is a remarkable story about war sufferings, mysteries, love against all odds, the healing power of music, well kept secrets, and the complicated family stories of concentration camp survivors, still trying to deal with the ghosts of the past.