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CINEVILLE
KZ Screening and Q&A with director
Rex Bloomstein
Monday 19th March
Time: screening at 7pm (doors and bar open at 6pm)
Venue: Lighthouse, 28 Kensington Street, Brighton
Cost: £5/£4 concs
Director: Rex Bloomstein
UK Distributor: Shooting People Films
Running time: 94 mins
Certificate: 12
“The year's most fascinating documentary”
Independent on Sunday
“Outstanding – a moving, ironic, darkly comic
film” Observer
“Fascinating” Daily Telegraph
“Elegant and stark” London Lite
“More revealing and effective than a standard Holocaust
documentary – a powerfully simple film” Guardian
Guide
On the banks of the river Danube, surrounded by the beautiful landscape
of Upper Austria, lies the picturesque town of Mauthausen. Against
the backdrop of the woods and water Oompah bands play in traditional
Austrian pubs, the obligatory fast-food restaurants serve the towns’
residents, and Mauthausens go about their daily lives. Two kilometers
from the town centre thousands upon thousands of people from over
30 nations were tortured and murdered. This is the site of a former
KZ – German short for concentration camp – a place that
today attracts busloads of tourists, parties of schoolchildren,
bikers and people from all over the world each day.
Giggling school-groups are quickly silenced as they enter the camp
and hear unimaginable stories of the atrocities that were committed
inside. Young tour-guides describe daily the torture and suffering
inflicted by SS guards on those who were brought to the camp. Around
Mauthausen residents talk proudly of their ‘idyllic’
town and their frustration of the stigma attached to living there.
Some older ladies reminisce about their ‘beautiful’
weddings to handsome former SS guards, others recount chilling childhood
memories; the smell of burning bodies over Mauthausen, the piles
of corpses in the streets.
Stripped of conventional documentary filmmaking devices –
archive footage, music, commentary, reconstructions, stills, historians,
testimonies from survivors – KZ offers a dramatically different
and startlingly powerful exploration of a difficult and oft-explored
subject, and is at once a timeless and contemporary film.
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