This article examines transnational memories of the Second World War by analysing two documentary films: Liebe Oma, Guten Tag! (2017) by Jūratė and Vilma Samulionytė and Memory Is Our Homeland (2018) by Jonathan Durand. Both films essayistic narratives deal with traumatic experiences and the particular ways of remembering and forgetting forced migration in the filmmakers’ families and communities. By comparing these two narratives realized by third generation filmmakers in Lithuania and Canada, respectively, allows me to articulate the contours of the silences in families on the two different sides of the Cold War in order to nuance understanding about different forms of postwar silences that sustained leaving the Soviet Union’s role in war unproblematized. I propose to understand the filmmakers’ searches to recover memories of these migrations in their families as transnational therapeutic memories.
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