I'm Viviane Silvera, a painter and Emmy Award–winning filmmaker. My films begin with questions that have stayed with me for years: How reliable are our memories? What happens when we discover that the stories we've lived by are incomplete? And how do we recover histories that are disappearing?
Working across non fiction filmmaking, painting, and hand-painted animation, I explore the ways memory shapes our understanding of ourselves, our families, and the world.
These three films approach memory from very different directions. One explores the neuroscience of remembering. Another follows a daughter uncovering the hidden life of her father. The third retraces my own father's escape from Syria and the mystery of a missing family manuscript.
Each began with a question. Each has taken me somewhere unexpected.
SEE MEMORY
Can we change the way we remember?
An Emmy Award–winning PBS documentary
What if memory isn't a recording of the past, but something we reconstruct each time we remember?
Created from approximately 30,000 hand-painted frames over ten years, SEE MEMORY brings together neuroscience, personal stories, and painting to explore how memories form, change, and shape our lives.
Featuring Nobel laureate Eric Kandel, neuroscientist Daniela Schiller, and clinicians working at the intersection of memory and trauma, the film offers a new way to visualize the extraordinary processes of remembering.
Three 2026 New York Emmy nominations | Winner, Outstanding Directing
Why your support matters
With the film completed and broadcast on PBS, the work now focuses on reaching the audiences who can put it to use: educators, mental health professionals, students, museums, and community organizations.
Your contribution helps expand screenings, educational resources, and conversations about memory, trauma, and the possibilities for change.
THE MEMORY LOOPHOLE
What if everything you thought you knew about your father was only part of the story?
A feature documentary in production
When writer Victoria Loustalot was a child, her father died, leaving behind a story she believed she understood.
Years later, she begins to uncover a life he kept hidden, confronting questions about identity, love, secrecy, and the memories that define a family.
The film moves between New York, Paris, London, and a remarkable cassette recording made by Victoria as a young woman. Through live-action filmmaking, projected imagery, and hand-painted animation, the past becomes a shifting landscape of memory and possibility.
At its heart is a question that extends beyond one family: What happens when we discover that someone we loved was also someone we never fully knew?
Why your support matters
THE MEMORY LOOPHOLE is currently in production. Contributions support filming, experimental animation, editing, archival research, and the development of its distinctive visual language.
The film has received the 2026 Atticus Award for Best Film-in-Progress.
PROJECTING ALEPPO
Can you recover a world that no longer exists?
A feature documentary in development
My father was born in Aleppo, Syria, into a Jewish community whose history stretched back centuries.
After the violence of 1947, his world began to unravel. At nineteen, he escaped Syria through a clandestine journey that eventually brought him to Rome, where he remembers feeling free to speak for the first time.
Decades later, I begin tracing his journey—and searching for an ancient Hebrew manuscript that belonged to our family, was donated to an Israeli institute, and subsequently disappeared.
Part family detective story, part exploration of a largely overlooked history, PROJECTING ALEPPO follows a father who has always looked forward and a daughter determined to understand what was left behind.
Combining testimony, archival discoveries, painting, and projected images, the film asks what can be recovered when the people, places, and objects that hold our history begin to vanish.
Why your support matters
PROJECTING ALEPPO is in early production, with an urgent need to preserve firsthand testimony while the generation that remembers Jewish life in Aleppo is still here.
Contributions will support interviews, archival research, filming, and the creation of its visual world.
SUPPORT PROJECTING ALEPPO — Donation link coming soon
Help Bring These Stories Into the World
Making independent films requires time, artistic experimentation, and people who believe these stories deserve to be told.
Your support helps preserve personal histories, bring new perspectives to audiences, and create films that might change how we see our own lives.
Each film has its own fundraising campaign through the Center for Independent Documentary, my nonprofit fiscal sponsor. Contributions can be directed to the project that speaks most deeply to you and may be tax-deductible to the extent permitted by law.
Thank you for being part of the journey.
Viviane Silvera
Artist & Emmy Award–Winning Filmmaker