Marceline Loridan-Ivens

Marceline Rozenberg was born on 19 March 1928 to Polish Jewish parents who emigrated to France in 1919.

At the beginning of World War II, her family settled in Vaucluse, where she joined the French Resistance. She and her father, Szlama, were captured by the Gestapo and deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau by Convoy 71 on 13 April 1944, along with Simone Veil and Anne-Lise Stern, then to Bergen-Belsen, and eventually to Theresienstadt. The camp was liberated on 10 May 1945 by the Red Army.

She met figures such as Henri Lefebvre and Edgar Morin, worked in the reprographic service of a polling institute, was bag carrier for the Algerian National Liberation Front, and frequented Saint-Germain-des-Prés.

In 1961, Edgar Morin cast her in the film Chronique d'un été, thus making her film debut. In 1963, she met and married the documentary director Joris Ivens. She assisted him in his work and co-directed some of his films, including 17th Parallel: Vietnam in War (1968). They left together for Vietnam, where they met Ho Chi Minh.

From 1972 to 1976, during the Cultural Revolution, Joris Ivens and Marceline Loridan worked in China and directed How Yukong Moved the Mountains, a series of 12 films Criticised by Jiang Qing, they had to quickly leave China.

The title of her 2003 film La petite prairie aux bouleaux (The little prairie of birches) is the literal translation of "Birkenau".

She first married Francis Loridan, an engineer. Years later they divorced, but she was allowed to keep his surname.

She later married Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens. They had no children, and Ivens died on 28 June 1989.