| Summary: | Vera Kohn, who died at the age of 100 in 2012, was a Jewish woman who had to fled Nazism and her native Prague on account of the Second World War in 1939. Hiding in Quito, Vera made a new life for herself as a theater actress. In Austria, she had been disciple to the psychotherapist and Zen master Karl Friedrich Dürckheim, and she introduced the teaching of her master into this Latin American country, thus becoming a pioneer of Zen philosophy in Ecuador. She founded the Comprehensive Development Center in Tumbaco, where she received poor people, for which she got several tributes on her humanitarian work. The original tragedy of this hundred-year-old woman is somewhat connected to the roots of the young director Bernhard Hetzenauer, whose grandfather was an SS soldier. This valuable documentary is a story which showcases homemade films and pictures, but whose greatest contribution consists of the continuous encounters between the young man and the old woman, which to him mean a brush with his family's dark past, but also a possible form of redemption.
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