Most of the negative reviews disparage Uwe Boll by either comparing him to the Spielberg of Schindler's list or to a documentary maker, this movie neither pretends nor aims at being any of those two things.
This is a short offering, with little to no budget, probably shot after rereading Hanna Harendt, and that, as Boll himself tells us, to just warn about the duty of memory.
The mix of archival images, as brutal today as they were when first seen, the varied level of understanding of the shoah among today's youth, mixing ignorance, misconceptions and, even when not too badly informed, a lack of vision of how this can, and does, happen even today, and finally the film part which does not aim at reconstructing a reality but at essentially showing the horror of administrative evil, the german soldiers are not sociopaths and that's what made their conscious effort to not apprehend the hideousness and utter denial of humanity of what they are doing even more terrifying.
Uwe Boll does exploitation movies, and here he clearly was moved to use his shocker footage and editing method to warn us, holocausts and loss of basic humanity can happen anytime and yes they are ugly and horrible. He did not make it to earn hundreds of millions of dollars in Hollywood, he did not do it to document the words of so many at risk of being lost like Lanzman made his life's work, he did it because he felt he needed to. At least that is my take on it.
This is a short offering, with little to no budget, probably shot after rereading Hanna Harendt, and that, as Boll himself tells us, to just warn about the duty of memory.
The mix of archival images, as brutal today as they were when first seen, the varied level of understanding of the shoah among today's youth, mixing ignorance, misconceptions and, even when not too badly informed, a lack of vision of how this can, and does, happen even today, and finally the film part which does not aim at reconstructing a reality but at essentially showing the horror of administrative evil, the german soldiers are not sociopaths and that's what made their conscious effort to not apprehend the hideousness and utter denial of humanity of what they are doing even more terrifying.
Uwe Boll does exploitation movies, and here he clearly was moved to use his shocker footage and editing method to warn us, holocausts and loss of basic humanity can happen anytime and yes they are ugly and horrible. He did not make it to earn hundreds of millions of dollars in Hollywood, he did not do it to document the words of so many at risk of being lost like Lanzman made his life's work, he did it because he felt he needed to. At least that is my take on it.