Regie: Rex Bloomstein
Produktie: Rex Entertainment
Screenplay: Rex Bloomstein
Photography: Alexander Boboschewski
Editing: Richard Rhys Davies
Sound: Guenther Tuppinger
World Sales: Films Transit International, Inc.
When the images of the unimaginable have been shown a thousand times, when the mind is numb - where do you go from there? You have to start anew.
That is where this film begins.
"It's very nice to be here," says a tourist surrounded by the beautiful landscape of Upper Austria, where he is visiting the former Nazi concentration camp of Mauthausen. He wants to go to Auschwitz next.Groups of tourists and school classes are offered Mauthausen as an attraction, but once inside, their facial expressions turn to genuine horror.
Down to the most atrocious details, the camp guides tell them what the prisoners went through. Still, this does not prevent some visitors from stealing the shower heads from the gas chambers as a souvenir. How does it feel to work here as a guide, day in, day out? How does it feel to live here as a local with the dark secrets of the past? And what of those who've chosen this town to be their new home?
Stripped of the usual dramatic devices, survivor testimonies and conventional
archival footage, this film shows present-day Mauthausen and the different generations of people who visit, live and work in a place where thousands upon thousands of people from over 30 nations were tortured and murdered.
Located on the banks of the Danube, the Austrian town of Mauthausen would be a picturesque testimony to the country's natural beauty were it not for the dark blot that stains both its landscape and its conscience. Two kilometres outside the town centre is the sprawling Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp (or "Konzentrationslager", Kz), where thousands of Jews, Russians, Poles and others were murdered en masse by the Nazis during the 1940s.
In this quietly disturbing documentary filmmaker Rex Bloomstein records a day in the life of the camp, following visitors as they confront this memorial to the Holocaust. Deliberately choosing not to tell the history of the camp itself, Bloomstein delivers a stripped down documentary - there's no voiceover or music, no historical context or survivor accounts. Instead, we're confronted with first-hand testimony from the camp's present occupiers: tour guides, visitors and the local townsfolk. The aim is to remove the usual documentary comforts (where history is neatly packaged) and jolt us out of our belief that this is just another film about the Holocaust. It works - spectacularly well.
Interviewing the camp's tour guides Bloomstein finds his main theme: how do we cope with the enormity of what happened? Most of the guides, it seems, don't. One is an alcoholic wreck, his whole life taken over by the camp. Others are young teens who opted to work here as part of their civil service rather than spend a year in the army. It certainly wasn't the softest option - "We're all ill up here," claims one guide - but they are eager to make amends for the past (each, it turns out had relatives who were in the SS or Wehrmacht).
KZ, a feature lenght documentary produced and directed by Rex Bloomstein, completed in June 2005, will premiere at IDFA2005 in the Joris Ivens Competition.
The Festival runs from the 24th November until the 4th Dezember 2005 in Amsterdam.
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