Plot

A young Jewish girl leads an escape attempt from a concentration camp.

Kapo is a black-and-white film that tells the story of a Jewish teenager sent to a concentration camp with her parents. She manages to survive with help from a Jewish doctor who gives her the identity of another woman who had died recently. Thus, Edith becomes Nicole and she is no longer a Jew, at least not in the papers. At first she is very sad about her parents' deaths, but as time passes she realizes she must get out of that mood if she wants to survive. So at 14 she submits to a German officer's advances and is rewarded with privileges; in time she becomes a Kapo, one of the women prisoners who were in charge of disciplining the other women. Though she knows it's the only way to survive, she hides deep remorse behind an expressionless face.—Marina Ionescu

Left to rot in a Nazi concentration camp, Edith, a fourteen-year-old Jewish girl, sees her parents die in the gas chamber. And, for fear of meeting her end, Edith summons up every last ounce of courage to accept the new reality, going to great lengths to survive. Now, with dogged determination, humiliation, degradation, and a new identity become her means to an end, as Edith becomes a "Kapo", a fierce supervisor put in charge of her fellow inmates. However, when a group of Russian prisoners of war arrives at the work camp, an audacious escape plan culminates in an inescapable vortex of violence and death. But love works in mysterious ways. Can war suppress the will to freedom?—Nick Riganas