Mira Hamermesh was born in 1923 into a Jewish family in Lodz, Poland. Following the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939, she joined her sister in Palestine, where she enrolled at the Bezalel School of Art in 1942 before moving to London to study at the Slade School of Art in 1947. After an early career as a painter, tutored by lifelong friend and fellow Pole, the Jewish artist Josef Herman, Hamermesh turned to film-making, making a series of acclaimed documentaries for Thames, the BBC and Channel 4.
Filmmaker and painter Mira Hamermesh was born Mirjam Hamermesz in 1923 into a middle-class Jewish family in Lodz, Poland. Her father owned a rubber factory, and Hamermesh and her siblings enjoyed a comfortable childhood. Following the Nazi invasion in September 1939 Hamermesh, then aged 16, set out for Palestine with her brother Mietek, hoping to join their sister Genia, a committed Zionist. After arriving in Soviet-occupied Lvov (now Lviv), Mietek was arrested as a spy and sentenced to 15 years in the gulag, from where he was later released to fight with General Anders's Polish Army in the Middle East. Hamermesh eventually reached Palestine in 1941; both her parents perished in the Holocaust: her mother died of starvation in the Lodz ghetto and her father was murdered in Auschwitz.
In 1942 she studied at the Bezalel School of Art in Jerusalem, and subsequently held solo exhibitions in the city at the Cabinets of Arts (1943) and the British Council (1946), after which she moved to London on a British Council scholarship to study at the Slade School of Art. Hamermesh soon moved from the painting to the sculpture department, under Professor Alfred Horace Gerrard. She also attended a stage design course under Russian émigré Vladimir Polunin (formerly designer for Diaghilev's renowned Ballets Russes) and, henceforward, theatre became her passion. In 1951 she married property developer Richard Coopman. Hamermesh continued to make figurative paintings and her models, chosen from friends, visiting au pairs and English country girls, always represented a great source of inspiration. After graduating from the Slade she was tutored by fellow Polish Jewish émigré, the painter Josef Herman, who was a major influence, becoming ‘the proverbial wise man to whom I would turn in times of trouble’ (Hamermesh 2004, p.194). She also recalled that Herman’s ‘approval meant a lot to me. He was a substitute father figure, sharing with my father not only the same name and similar coloured eyes, but also generosity of spirit. Both were free with their praise and encouragement’ (p. 257). In 1960 London's Brook Street Gallery presented a solo exhibition of her paintings and watercolours, mostly images of women which received positive press reviews. Art critic Edward Lucie-Smith commented in Arts Review that ‘Miss Hamermesh has the power one always finds in a good realist painter of welding colour and draughtsmanship into an inseparable unity. […] There is a relationship to the work of Herman and the influence of Cezanne is also evident […] but I don’t find the pictures derivative. The colour is personal […] the breath and sureness crammed into spaces […] is astonishing and the pictures must be some of the most satisfying objets de collection currently on view in London.’ (Hamermesh 2004, p. 259). Jasia Reichardt (herself a Polish émigré) noted in Apollo that ‘The characters and personages painted by Mira H. seem to bear on their shoulders the weight of the world. Their sturdiness and bulk is as much a part of their power as the sad gaze of experience and preoccupation is part of their presence […] These seated women busily sewing, gazing, or eating, have a more universal quality. They are, so to speak, effigies of an idea as well as being identifiable characters’ (Hamermesh 2004, p. 259).
Among the visitors to the exhibition was the dean of the Polish National Film School in Lodz, whom Hamermesh had met the previous year during her first trip to her native city since 1939. Following the dean’s visit she was offered a place at the School, one of the first students from the West to be admitted. After seeing Generation , directed by fellow Pole, Andrzej Wajda, Hamermesh understood that film, rather than painting, would allow her to better express her feminist views and her concerns over war and social injustice. She studied in Lodz from 1961–65, during which time she directed a number of short films. Hamermesh returned to England and directed her first British documentary, End of Term (ITV, 1963), about an English prep school. In 1968 she went to Israel to make documentaries for Israeli television. From the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s, she made acclaimed documentaries for Thames, the BBC and Channel 4. As a filmmaker, she won many international awards, including the Prix Italia (for her film about apartheid, 'Maids and Madams') and the Royal Television Society Award, and her work was featured in the UK's 1989 Jewish Film Festival. In 2004, she published her memoirs River of Angry Dogs . In 2011, she was honoured with a mini-retrospective at the Polish Arts Festival in Southend, Essex, a year before her death in 2012. In 2013 the British Film Institute (BFI) in London organised a posthumous mini-retrospective. In December 2019, BBC Radio 4 broadcast a dramatisation of her memoirs, as part of a series, 'This is Your Country Now Too', comprising seven new dramas, each narrating the arrival of a child or young person on British territory as a refugee, across the twentieth century. Publicity material, photographs and production papers relating to Hamermesh's films are held in the Special Collections of the BFI.
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Mira Hamermesh]
Publications related to [Mira Hamermesh] in the Ben Uri Library