More than a million Jews were killed by the Nazis at the Auschwitz concentration camps. Directed by the veteran French-Australian filmmaker and artist Philippe Mora, this brief documentary focuses on the second of these camps, at Birkenau. Eight of Mora's family were victims of Hitler's regime, so it's clearly a deeply personal journey.
Unfortunately this attachment doesn't translate into a compelling documentary. Of course this episode in history "must not be forgotten", and any record of the horrors of the Third Reich are inherently valuable. But essentially what we get is a 50-minute home video about a man visiting a series of museums (chief amongst which is Birkenau itself).
To be fair to Mora, he states that the film is for his grandchildren. For the rest of us, we are offered little background or insight that couldn't be garnered from Wikipedia. Interviews with Mora's mother are amiable but lack depth. At under an hour, is there really room for a digression about the celebrities that showed up at Mirka's wedding?
I can understand the desire to create an accessible entryway into the subject – Claude Lanzmann's seminal documentary Shoah is nearly ten hours long, after all – but brevity needn't mean shallowness.
We are told various anecdotes – including an enlightening one about Mora's youthful interview with Albert Speer, Hitler's chief architect – but actually shown very little beyond repetitious shots of tourists observing ruins. At one point we're told of how the British liberated the camps and immediately filmed what they found. We get glimpses of this footage, but it's filmed second-hand, from the screen of a monitor, complete with distracting light reflections.
There's an ongoing motif of trains, both of the period and in modern times, which is a potentially interesting juxtaposition about the locomotive's different meaning to different generations. Yet like everything else, it's just there, never explored.
To compound the frustration, Mora uses an aggravating fish-eye lens throughout, needlessly distorting the picture. The images are married to a score by Eric Clapton, which eschews Ligeti-style horror to focus on the tragedy, and ends up sounding sickly and sentimental.
One of the questions Mora keeps asking is, 'How is it possible to make a film about Auschwitz?' His lightweight documentary provides previous little evidence that it is.
Unfortunately this attachment doesn't translate into a compelling documentary. Of course this episode in history "must not be forgotten", and any record of the horrors of the Third Reich are inherently valuable. But essentially what we get is a 50-minute home video about a man visiting a series of museums (chief amongst which is Birkenau itself).
To be fair to Mora, he states that the film is for his grandchildren. For the rest of us, we are offered little background or insight that couldn't be garnered from Wikipedia. Interviews with Mora's mother are amiable but lack depth. At under an hour, is there really room for a digression about the celebrities that showed up at Mirka's wedding?
I can understand the desire to create an accessible entryway into the subject – Claude Lanzmann's seminal documentary Shoah is nearly ten hours long, after all – but brevity needn't mean shallowness.
We are told various anecdotes – including an enlightening one about Mora's youthful interview with Albert Speer, Hitler's chief architect – but actually shown very little beyond repetitious shots of tourists observing ruins. At one point we're told of how the British liberated the camps and immediately filmed what they found. We get glimpses of this footage, but it's filmed second-hand, from the screen of a monitor, complete with distracting light reflections.
There's an ongoing motif of trains, both of the period and in modern times, which is a potentially interesting juxtaposition about the locomotive's different meaning to different generations. Yet like everything else, it's just there, never explored.
To compound the frustration, Mora uses an aggravating fish-eye lens throughout, needlessly distorting the picture. The images are married to a score by Eric Clapton, which eschews Ligeti-style horror to focus on the tragedy, and ends up sounding sickly and sentimental.
One of the questions Mora keeps asking is, 'How is it possible to make a film about Auschwitz?' His lightweight documentary provides previous little evidence that it is.
