Michel Kichka

Brussels, Belgium, 1959. Michel and Charly Kichka, two Jewish brothers, enjoy a happy childhood with their parents and their two sisters. Henri, their discreet and usually silent father, does not speak at all about his past, so they imagine that as a young man he was an adventurer, a pirate or a treasure hunter.

At age 67, after reaching the top of the illustration world in Israel and beyond, Michel Kichka was forced to give up his place at the Bezalel Academy in favor of the younger generation. As a cartoonist, he documented the Zionist dream and its upending: a new and enthusiastic Zionist who came from Belgium to help in the Yom Kippur War turned prophet of doom. The evolution of his cartoons reflects a general deterioration of values ​​across Israeli society, politics, and the memory of the Holocaust. With his talent, he turned into a “rough Jerusalemite” with a Belgian accent who is not afraid to tell us the truth to our faces. To heal himself from the burden of the second generation, Kichka created a graphic novel revealing everything about his family and his father’s silence that led to a family tragedy. This work about the second generation was turned into an animated French feature film that tries to remind the younger generation of the Holocaust.

Michel Kichka (born 1954 in Liège) is a renowned cartoonist and illustrator living in Jerusalem. In his graphic novel Second Generation, he addresses the impact the traumatization of his father, Holocaust survivor Henri Kichka (born 1926 in Brussels), had on him and his siblings. The publication forms the beginning of a long journey through the past into the future. The film follows father and son Kichka during two intensive years in Israel, Belgium, France with many interlocutors. In one of the most intense moments of the film, father and son go to the place where Henri was arrested by the Gestapo in 1942. The 63-year-old Michel has never been there before, the 91-year-old Henri avoids this place, which for him is filled with the worst feelings ever, it manifests in him the second that was to change his life forever horrible.