In an original and very personal film, Oxenberg sketches an intimate portrait of her grandmother and investigates her own youth. She follows intensively the last months in the life of her Jewish grandmother Mae Joffe, who died in 1979 of cancer. Despite the sorrow about the death of her grandmother, Thank You and Good Night is not sombre in tone; it can even be called a comedy.Oxenberg does not stand in front of the camera, but uses large cardboard cut-outs of herself as a child, which she places on camera. She did this to indicate that the perspective in the film is that of a child . It is a question of memories of her youth. She also wanted to create some kind of distance to the very autobiographical subject.The film is a combination of documentary and feature. Oxenberg spent twelve years collecting the documentary material. She compiled the documentary material, often from home movies, with theatrical, humorous and bizarre scenes and combined different angles to an intriguing hybrid whole: that of the child, that of the adult who remembers and that of the patient in psychoanalysis. The result was well-received by thecritics. Variety: ‘It’s an insightful and often uplifting piece full of wry comic touches.’Oxenberg says in an interview that Syberberg’s Hitler. Ein Film aus Deutschland as a source of inspiration, but stresses at the same time that her own temperament is closer to the comic genre that to drama. Kay Armatage (Toronto Film Festival): ‘Entertaining and thought-provoking, soul-searching and funny, deeply sentimental and rigorously sceptical, Thank You and Good Night is a wonderful film.’
