KZ

DC Premiere

The violence perpetuated in the Nazi concentration camps was as much against the psychic identity of the victims as against their bodies, and the act of remembering those victims always requires confronting the fragility of dignity and individuality. For visitors and residents of Mauthausen, Austria, where Konzen-trationslager Mauthausen (shortened KZ) was located, life is saturated with memory.

Rex Bloomstein's KZ muses on the ways we assimilate and avoid the collective memory of that violence. Never showing us the images of the Holocaust so familiar from movies past, Bloomstein here presents the Mauthausen horror only through the eyes of present-day tourists and tour guides at the memorial and of residents of the picturesque town that surrounds it.

All of Bloomstein's subjects engage in different processes of remembering and all resist the full enormity of the tragedy, clinging to the mental space made possible by the safety of memory. As tourists struggle to understand and to commemorate, as tour guides cope with the overwhelming emotion of recounting the atrocities of the past, residents confront the dilemma of living an ordinary life in the shadow of a place haunted by 150,000 ghosts.

Bloomstein's film is full of silences, moments when the camera lingers for a few seconds on the face of someone who has finished speaking or on the beautiful Austrian landscape. The Holocaust, both in its time and in memory, was a silencing of our humanity. KZ is a film about remembering that silence, about the silencing of those memories, and about coming to terms with the ineradicable stain left by incomprehensible violence.

-Caroline Small

Sponsored by
The Israeli Embassy

DIRECTOR BIO
Rex Bloomstein began at the BBC in the UK in 1970, directing cinema verité studies of British life. His early works centered on exposing the previously closed penal system: STRANGEWAYS won two British Academy Awards. The core of his films focus on exploring the Holocaust and exploring international human rights abuses. KZ is his first theatrical feature film.

Print Source:
John Nadai, Films Transit International, Inc.
252 Gouin Blvd. East
Monteral, QC H3L1A8
Canada
514.844.3358
john@filmstransit.com

6/16 at 5:30 PM

FILMS BY: TITLE | DATE | COUNTRY | INTEREST | SECTION